The Beinart Notebook

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West BankA way to directly help victims of the massacre in SydneyThis week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guests will be two remarkable people, Musya Herzog and Meyer Labin. Musya is a neuropsychologist who grew up in the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Meyer is a Yiddish-language journalist and writer from the Satmar community. Both are now active in Smol Emuni, the religious left. They’ll talk about the discourse about Israel and Zionism in ultra-Orthodox communities, and what it might take to make them more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.Cited in Today’s VideoThe premier of New South Wales calls for banning “globalize the intifada.”Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Samuel Stein reports on Zohran Mamdani’s looming struggle with the real estate industry.Gaza no longer faces famine. But its people are still hungry.Israel is preparing for a permanent presence in Gaza.On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.A Holiday GiveawayWe’ve had many requests to open up certain interviews, so they are free and shareable for all. So, this holiday season, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by liking that comment.) If this goes well we’ll make it an annual tradition.See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So now, a week or so after the terrible massacre in Sydney, Australia, the Australian government is considering doing some sensible things, like limiting the number of guns that any person in Australia can own, but also considering doing some things that would be really fundamental violations of people’s rights to free speech. Among them, the Premier of New South Wales, the Australian state that encompasses Sydney, said that he wants to ban the phrase “globalize the intifada.”Now, this is really stupid and dangerous at a number of levels. First of all, does anyone really think that banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would have stopped this father and son, who were evidently connected to ISIS, from having committed this terrible attack? If these people had an ISIS ideology, banning the phrase “globalize the intifada” would do absolutely nothing to prevent them from committing this heinous terrorist attack. On its face, it’s just ridiculous to think that banning this phrase would have done anything to prevent the terrible violence that occurred. But beyond that, it’s simply a grave violation of people’s basic, fundamental rights to say that you can’t use the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Intifada is an Arabic word that means uprising. It doesn’t mean uprising against Israel or Jews. It means uprising in general. The Arab Spring was often referred to as an intifada. An intifada, like any uprising, or any revolutionary political movement, can be violent or nonviolent. The first Palestinian intifada, in the late 1980s, was largely nonviolent. The second one, in the early 2000s, was much more violent. It can be violent or non-violent.So, yes, “globalize the intifada” could be interpreted as a call for violence. It could also be interpreted as a call for an uprising that’s not violent. But even if “globalize the intifada” is interpreted, or meant by the speaker, as a call for violence, we allow people to call for violence on the streets all the time. Threatening violence against one individual person is one thing, but saying you support violence in general in some kind of political context is not at all. If people protest in defense of Ukraine’s right to fight against Russia, and protest for their government to give arms to Ukraine. They’re protesting in support of Ukrainians using violence in that cause.The fact that it’s a call for violence doesn’t mean that it should be banned. Similarly, if someone goes out in a protest and says Israel has the right to defend itself; I stand with the IDF. In the wake of what Israel’s been doing in Gaza, those are endorsements of violence. People have the right to say those things. People have the right to participate in political speech, and in political speech around a whole range of different things. People often endorse violence of various forms that they believe will serve their political ends. Sometimes those calls for violence are odious, sometimes those calls for violence, as—let’s say in the case of Ukraine—might be ones that are widely supported. But the point is that people have the right to make that kind of political speech.You know, I still remember when it was conservatives—including many Jewish conservatives— who would say, in response to what they felt like were the excesses of the ‘woke left’ who were trying to restrict speech on college campuses that would say again and again that speech is not violence. And that’s actually true. At least, speech that endorses violence in a broad sense, right? Again, I’m not talking about violence directed at a particular individual in a particular moment, but people who endorse the idea of violence in some broader sense, that speech is not in and of itself violence, right? If you say, I supported the Iraq War, right, that was a call for violence. It was not violence in and of itself. And this distinction is completely being collapsed in this case. Again, this is even if you assume the harshest interpretation of the phrase, which is that it is a call for violence, which some people who will use that phrase would strongly contest.I think a lot of this reminds me of this now-famous book that Naomi Klein wrote called The Shock Doctrine, in which in the wake of a shock, in which people are traumatized and angry and afraid, you take advantage of that to push through things that you’ve been wanting to push through for ages, but you now have the political opportunity to do so in a time when reason often goes out the window, and you can appeal to people’s emotions and fears.We saw this, of course, in the United States after September 11th with the passage of the Patriot Act. To a different degree, we saw this after October 7th in the United States, with a massive crackdown on free speech, of rights of people to protest on university campuses and elsewhere, that I think historians will look back—as they do in the post-911 era—as a period of very serious infractions of people’s rights to free speech, the firing of professors, the deportation of students on foreign visas because they had made politically controversial statements.All of this stuff is now what is being attempted to be reenacted in Australia by Australian politicians and by pro-Israel organizations. None of this will do anything to make Australian Jews safer. What it will do is exactly what it did in the United States after September 11th, what it did in the 1950s in the hysteria and the wake in the McCarthy era during the Korean War, and what it has done since October 7th. It will do in Australia what it has done in America, which is not to make anyone safer, but to make the country less free.And when you start to violate people’s basic rights to free speech for one political purpose, you open the door to people to start doing that in many, many arenas. So, if you can ban the phrase “globalize the intifada” because people find that phrase threatening, and they say that speech that could support violence is in itself violence, you are opening the door to lots and lots of other people going around and trying to restrict your speech on the same grounds.And that’s the way in which countries become less free. That is what has happened in the United States over the last 25 years, and I think Australians should think long and hard about whether they want to go down our path now in the wake of this terrible massacre in Sydney. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comSarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice.

This week’s zoom call will be at A SPECIAL TIME: THURSDAY AT 2 PM Eastern. In light of the Chanukah massacre in Sydney, we’ll talk to Sarah Schwartz, a human rights lawyer who grew up in Sydney, and is the founding executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a Jewish community organization founded to fight against antisemitism and all forms of racism, and to support Palestinian freedom and justice. We’ll talk about the unique history of the Jewish community in Australia, about the rise of antisemitism there and about how to combat it while also opposing bigotry against all people.Cited in Today’s VideoThe Babylonian Talmud’s discussion of the dangers of lighting a Chanukiah in public.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Anne Irfan shows how the Trump plan for Gaza is crowding Palestinians there into even less land.Dana El Kurd talks to Matan Kaminer and Ben Schuman-Stoler about Gaza and the Abraham Accords.A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.See you on Thursday at 2,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:When I woke up on Sunday morning and read the news of this terrible massacre on the first night of Chanukah in Sydney, Australia, a couple of things went through my mind.The first is about the nature of Jews in Australia, and the second is about the nature of Chanukah. I’ve had the good fortune of spending a fair amount of time in the Jewish community in Sydney and Melbourne, and the Australian Jewish community is one of the most extraordinary that I have ever seen anywhere in the world. It’s a very, very cohesive Jewish community; very, very vibrant; very strong dedication to Jewish education. And it’s different than the American Jewish community in that it is closer to the European experience. Most American Jews came to the U.S. in the late 19th or early 20th century. Many Australian Jews came later, before or after the Holocaust. And so, you have a much larger percentage of families in Australia that are the direct descendants of people who survived the Holocaust, with many, many families being touched very, very deeply by that experience. It is really a community that is more, I think, affected, more closer to, more traumatized by the experience of the Holocaust than almost any other Jewish community on Earth. And so, for a community that has that deep trauma in so many Australian Jewish families, to now have this new trauma, this terrible, terrible massacre that killed—we now know—15 people on the first night of Chanukah is just horrifying beyond words.The second thing is about the fact that it happened on Chanukah. When I read the news, I was reminded that there’s not a lot of discussion about Chanukah in the Talmud, but in the relatively brief discussion there is, there’s a discussion in Tractate Shabbat about the nature, about the mitzvah to put the Chanukiah—the Chanukah lamp—in the entrance to one’s house.And the rabbis say that the mitzvah, the obligation, is to put the Chanukiah, the lamp, in the window, so it is visible to the public. But then, they say that the sages say that in a time of danger, in a time of religious persecution, when Jews are not allowed to perform the mitzvah of lighting the Chanukah lamp, it is permitted to place the Chanukiah on the table instead, so it can’t be seen from outside.And so, it was very, very poignant to think about this discussion in the Babylonian Talmud against the backdrop of this experience in Sydney, Australia, which did turn out to be extremely dangerous—deadly, actually—to perform the mitzvah of publicizing the miracle of Chanukah, and that the rabbis, you know, the rabbis close to 2,000 years ago, were worried about this very issue. Could Jews safely celebrate Chanukah, publicize the mitzvah of Chanukah, or did we need a special dispensation to say that in times of grave danger, that Jews can perform the Chanukah ritual, the celebration, in private?And so, to me, that seems to me, in some ways, kind of one way of thinking about what is at stake today, in a world of rising antisemitism. Do we live in a world in which it is safe for Jews to light Chanukiahs in public, as the rabbis prefer to publicize the miracle that happened, that we celebrate on Chanukah, or do we live in a time of such great danger that Jews should have to do so in private because the risk of doing what those Australian Jews did on the first night on Bondi Beach in Sydney is actually too dangerous?I am sure, I am sure, that the response by Jewish communities around the world will be to double down on the obligation to publicize the miracle, perform the celebration of Chanukah in public, to not be daunted, to not be scared by this. But it is terrible. It is terrible to imagine that there might be some who actually now need to go back to the Talmudic discussion, about whether it’s safe, in fact, to light a Chanukiah, given now that we’ve seen this terrible, terrible massacre in Sydney. It just shows that we still live in a world that is dangerous for Jews, and that some of the ancient, ancient discussions about how to keep Jews safe are still relevant today, and that some of the terrible, terrible horrors that many Australian Jews faced, the antisemitism in their families in Europe, that in a different way, that antisemitism has returned in Australia, and on Chanukah of all holidays. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comMahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, and father of the mayor-elect of New York City. We’ll talk about Professor Mamdani’s new memoir about his family’s experience in Uganda, his research on the similarities—and differences—between settler-colonialism in South Africa, Israel-Palestine and the United States, and what it’s like to be a Muslim in Trump’s America.

. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

Given the controversy over my talk at Tel Aviv University, I thought it would be interesting to talk to two experts on boycotts. Zackie Achmat is a veteran South African political activist and a leading authority on the role of boycotts in the anti-apartheid movement. Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, which chronicles non-violent protest in Palestinian history. We spoke about the history of boycotts in both places, the ethical dilemmas they create, and whether or not they work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

Recently, Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote an essay criticizing my apology for speaking at Tel Aviv University. I thought it would be a good idea to have him on to explore our differences. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This week’s call will be at a special time, WEDNESDAY at 1 PM. Given the controversy over my talk at Tel Aviv University, and subsequent apology, I thought it would be interesting to talk to two experts on boycotts: one South African and one Palestinian. Zackie Achmat is a veteran South African political activist and a leading authority on the role of boycotts in the anti-apartheid movement. Mazin Qumsiyeh is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University and the author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, which chronicles non-violent protest in Palestinian history. We’ll talk about the history of boycotts in both places, the ethical dilemmas they create and whether or not they work.This week’s live Zoom call will be for paid subscribers, as usual. But we will make the video available for everyone.Cited in Today’s VideoThe Trump administration’s agreement with Northwestern University.At Harvard, Muslim students are more than twice as likely as Jewish students to feel unsafe.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Lee Mordechai chronicles Israel’s “collective amnesia” about the genocide in Gaza.For the Foundation for Middle East Peace, I talked to Ahmed Moor about my apology for speaking at Tel Aviv University.I talked on the Know Your Enemy podcast about the varying Jewish reactions to Zohran Mamdani.Haaretz profiles Israel’s “Faithful Left.”Check our Terrell Starr’s excellent Substack newsletter.The New York Times named Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza one of the 100 notable books of 2025.I’ll be speaking on December 8 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City.Reader ResponseI occasionally publish letters from readers who take issue with something I’ve said. This one comes from Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal:“I don’t understand why you felt you made ‘a serious mistake’ by speaking at Tel Aviv University. Virtually all of the humanities lecturers at the university are on the left, as are a good percentage of the students. They are highly critical of the extreme right-wing government policy, and the current Tel Aviv University President Prof. Ariel Porat has defended the right of Arab and left-wing students to protest against the war.My predecessor as Israeli Co-Editor of Palestine-Israel Journal was Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal. When he was the Co-Director of Tel Aviv University’s Walter Lebach Research Institute for Jewish-Arab Coexistence, together with Prof. Amal Jamal, a Palestinian-Israel, we arranged for them to host a presentation by Prof. Johan Galtung at the university, who is considered the father of peace research. That earned Bar-Tal the title of “enemy of Israel” from all the right-wing watchdogs. And Galtung himself (who was also on the enemy of Israel lists), who was highly critical of both Israeli and American government policies, had no problem appearing at Tel Aviv U. alongside an appearance we arranged for him at the Palestinian Al-Quds University in Abu-Dis in the West Bank.You could have found a way to show respect for the BDS movement while at the same explaining that you are critical of any support that any part of the university gives to the IDF. The literature departments definitely don’t supply arms to the IDF, and their curriculum is under attack from the right-wing ministers of education and culture.”See you on Wednesday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, the day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration announced another agreement with an American university—in this case Northwestern University. And it’s really striking if you look at the language that Trump’s Department of Justice uses in describing the terms of this agreement.So, let me just quote a couple of elements from it. The Justice Department writes that Northwestern University will ‘safeguard its students, employees and faculty from unlawful discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and national origin, including race-based admissions practices and a hostile educational environment directed towards Jewish students.’ And then it goes on that the university will ensure that it ‘does not preference individuals based on race, color, or national origin in admission, scholarships, hiring, or promotion.’ And then it goes on to say that it will ‘implement mandatory antisemitism training for all students, faculty, and staff.’So, what do you notice about this language? On the one hand, the Trump administration is boasting that Northwestern is going to treat all students equally, irrespective of race, religion, national origin, etc. And then, literally in the next sentence, it says and it’s also going to do this special thing to protect Jewish students, this special thing to fight against antisemitism. Essentially, what it’s doing is it’s putting the safety and rights of Jewish students in a separate category from the safety and rights of all other students. This is really a disastrous, I think, development actually for Jewish students on campus and for American Jews in general.The position of American Jewish organization should be that Jewish students on campus should be treated exactly the same as everybody else. And that should be part of a broader strategy and struggle among American Jewish organizations to say that the struggle against antisemitism will be part of a larger struggle against all forms of bigotry.But that’s not what the Trump administration wants at all, actually, because the Trump administration takes a completely different view about what it calls bigotry towards Jewish students than, let’s say, bigotry towards, let’s say, Muslim students or Black students, right? Because when it comes to Muslim students, the Trump administration doesn’t think bigotry is a problem at all. In fact, the Trump administration is very blatantly practicing bigotry, right? Donald Trump just the other day basically was making fun of Representative Ilhan Omar’s hijab. This is an administration that has said that the only immigrants it wants to come to the United States are white South Africans, that it wants to cut off all third world immigration. It’s an administration that demonizes trans students, right?So, basically what the administration is doing is creating a two-tier system in which it essentially says that Jewish students should have particular protections, which are different, superior protections for their concerns and their safety than other students, right? Now, perhaps if we lived in a world in which Jewish students were uniquely threatened, there might be some justification for that. But that’s really not the case at all. Yes, Jewish students face antisemitism, of course, right? But actually, given the state-sponsored bigotry against Muslims, against Black people, against trans people, they are actually at greater risk than Jewish students.And the data from college campuses actually, you know, bear this out. When Harvard University created an antisemitism task force and an Islamic phobia task force, they simply asked Muslim and Jewish students at Harvard whether they felt unsafe. And they found that while only 26% of Jewish students said they felt unsafe, fifty-six percent—more than twice as high a percentage—of Muslim students said they felt unsafe. So, there’s no logical empirical basis whatsoever for basically suggesting that there’s a kind of crisis around the treatment of Jewish students and that you’re going to therefore treat them in a fundamentally different way than you treat other groups of students.What the Trump administration is really doing is creating a two-tier system in which it creates a kind of Jewish supremacy on college campuses because the rights of Jewish students are considered more important than the rights of other students. This is, in a way, a kind of importing of the Israeli model of what makes Jews safe, as opposed to the traditional American model, which comes out of the American Jewish role in the Civil Rights Movement, which argues that the safety of American Jews comes from arguing for equality under the law and fighting against bigotry for all groups.But you have elements in the organized American Jewish community, which is essentially allied with the Trump administration’s strategy. This is not just terrible for all of those other groups that have the rights and concerns of their students not being centered, right? But it also is very, very bad for Jewish students. It’s very bad for Jewish students to be singled out in this way. That in a weird way, the claim that Jewish students deserve certain kind of superior protections is actually very much the flip side of this rising antisemitism, particularly on the right, which sees the idea that Jews have certain special protections or special influence, power as they see it in the United States, and actually, that fuels their hostility to Jews.This Trump administration effort is actually very, very dangerous, I think, for Jewish students as well as all other students. And it should be rejected by American Jewish leaders who should make it very clear that they don’t want special privileges for Jewish students, they want the same standard for Jewish students and all others. That would mean actually rejecting what the Trump administration is trying to do at places like Northwestern. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comAnne Irfan is an expert on Palestinian refugee rights, the UN and UNRWA. She is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London (UCL). She has previously taught at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics, and the University of Sussex.I invited her to talk about her latest book, A Short History of the Gaza Strip.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Chapman University Professor Emeritus Nubar Hovsepian, author of the new book, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual. We talked about Professor Hovsepian’s insights into Said, his close friend, and about what we might learn from Said’s work for this moment in Israel-Palestine and the United States.

Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove is the rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. He has written for a variety of Jewish publications, including The Jewish Week and The Forward. He is the author of the 2024 book “For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today” and the host of the podcast Common Faith.We have some strong disagreements so I’m grateful that he was willing to come on and discuss them with me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Chapman University Professor Emeritus Nubar Hovsepian, author of the new book, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual. We’ll talk about Professor Hovsepian’s insights into Said, his close friend, and about what we might learn from Said’s work for this moment in Israel-Palestine and the United States.Ask Me AnythingOur next Ask Me Anything session, for PREMIUM subscribers only, will be this Wednesday, November 12, from 1-2 PM Eastern time.Cited in Today’s VideoRabbi Chaim Steinmetz’s message to his congregation that after Mamdani’s victory, life for New York Jews is “beginning to feel like the 1930s.”Jason Sokol’s, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), I argued that Zohran Mamdani’s victory may herald a coalition between anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists that can transform the Democratic Party.Why the polls may understate Mamdani’s share of the Jewish vote.Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 50 years ago, on last week’s Parsha, Parshat Vayeira.Rabbi Aron Wander on the psychotheology of American Zionism.I’ll be speaking on November 10 at Cornell University and Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York and on December 8 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York City.Reader ResponseI occasionally publish letters from readers who take issue with something I’ve said. This one comes from Sophia (last name withheld):I’ve been reading your coverage of Mamdani and although I think a lot of it is very fair criticism of establishment Judaism, respectfully, I think you are missing one major point. Speaking only for myself, I can tell you that I *hate* Cuomo, and that the idea of voting for him is repellent to me. I too hate the Islamophobia that is showing in our community, and I hate the message that sexual harassment is acceptable in a way that antisemitism is not. These messages are embarrassing and offensive to me.Two things can be true at the same time, though. I have no issue with people being so-called critical of Israel, and of that criticism having grown in intensity in the last two years (it certainly has for me). However, I find Mamdani to be monomaniacally obsessed with Israel and its crimes in a way that I find concerning and even antisemitic. When people say what about North Korea, China, Sudan, etc., I don’t find that to be an excuse for Israel’s behavior. But when he identifies Israel in one way or another as the source of most evils here in the US, I think that is suspicious. Israel is not the cause of racist policing in the U.S., that predates Israel! I am not assuaged by him promising to protect synagogues; that would be his job as mayor, not a favor he hands out to Jews. If he is so concerned (correctly) about affordability in the city, stop campaigning on your commitment to defund the Technion; it is basically a dog-whistle at this point for the anti-Israel and even antisemitic Left (which are two descriptors that I distinguish between, as I don’t believe being anti-Israel is necessarily antisemitic)See you on Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, there’s a rabbi on the Upper East Side of New York named Chaim Steinmetz. He is the rabbi of a synagogue called Kehilath Jeshurun. It’s probably the most prominent Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side of New York. It’s one of the most prominent Orthodox synagogues in all of New York, in fact, in all of America.And after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s election for mayor of New York, he wrote in a letter to his congregants, ‘it’s beginning to feel like the 1930s.’ It’s beginning to feel like the 1930s. He’s not the only person who feels this way. A prominent rabbi in the Hamptons on Long Island announced that he’s going to build an entire Jewish Day School, because he’s expecting so many Jews to flee New York City in fear, and come out to Long Island, and he’s going to build a day school for their children.Now, for many, many people, many non-Jews, but also many Jews, many progressive Jews, this is baffling. It’s just really, really hard to understand how people could look at Zohran Mamdani, a guy who won at least a third of the Jewish vote, a guy who’s got tons and tons of Jews in his campaign, a guy who speaks again and again and again about Jewish safety and about his opposition to antisemitism, a guy who smiles constantly, that they would feel this level of terror just because Mamdani believes that Israel should be a state in which Palestinians and Jews are treated equally.But it’s important to try to understand the reason for this terror, which I think in many, many people’s cases is actually genuine. And it’s also really important to understand that this is not… this kind of terror is not a particularly Jewish story. It’s not a particularly Jewish phenomenon. I think it’s important to emphasize that because the exceptionalization of Israel and Jews, I think, can lead to antisemitism.I think the best way to understand this terror is by recognizing that people who become very invested in political systems of group supremacy, in which one group, a religious, ethnic, racial group has supremacy over another, that when you become deeply invested in that, you associate your safety, your identity with that system. The prospect of equality comes to seem extraordinarily frightening. Indeed, equality becomes, in a way, tantamount to death. The prospect of equality is associated with death, or at least subjugation.And this is not particular to Jews who identify very, very strongly with the political system of the state of Israel. It’s, I think, common to groups of people who have become accustomed to a system of religious or racial or ethnic or group supremacy. So, a couple of quotes actually from my book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza:· In 1998, when the Good Friday Accords were signed, which gave Catholics equality in Northern Ireland, the Protestant leader, Ian Paisley, called the Good Friday Accords a prelude to genocide.· In 1979, there was a poll of White South Africans, which found that 84% of White South Africans believed that if there were a Black government in South Africa, ‘the physical safety of Whites would be threatened.’· There’s a wonderful book about White Southerners during the Civil Rights Movement by the historian Jason Sokol. It’s called There Goes My Everything, White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945 to 1975. And Sokol writes, ‘they thought in terms of White supremacy or Black supremacy. If Blacks gained rights, Whites would correspondingly wear the yoke.’This, I think, is what we see in the reaction to Zohran Mamdani. We see it among Jewish Israelis, but we also see it among Jews in New York and other places who are very, very strongly identified with Israel’s political system, the idea that equality actually means the subjugation or even death of Jews.Now, of course, this is increased by the history of Jews that we have, of a deep history of oppression, persecution, indeed genocide. But you notice that even groups like, let’s say, Protestants in Northern Ireland, or White South Africans, or White Southerners, who don’t have as dark a history of persecution as Jews do, still tend to see things the same way. That they look at someone like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or the Catholics in Northern Ireland, and they don’t see people striving for equality. They see people striving for their subjugation, and they’re particularly reinforced in that by the fact that these people who, you know, represent subordinate groups often have a great deal of anger towards these systems of supremacy, and in many cases, even are involved in acts of violence.And I think it’s in that framework that you can start to understand why people can look at Zohran Mamdani, and they might recognize that he seems like a nice guy, that he smiles a lot. They may even recognize that some Jews like him, that he’s got Jews in his campaign, that he says he’s against antisemitism. But none of that really penetrates if you very deeply associate the system of Jewish supremacy with your very safety. And so, when you see—and these people are right to recognize that Zohran Mamdani is an opponent of Jewish supremacy. As he said, he doesn’t believe that Israel should be a state that gives Jews legal privileges over Palestinians. He believes that all states should be based on a system of equality under the law.And although many Jews in New York are very accustomed to that idea—and even would support that idea in the United States—their strong association with a system of Jewish supremacy in Israel means that it doesn’t matter how much Mamdani smiles, and it doesn’t matter how many, you know, left-wing Jews he hangs out with. What he is proposing to do represents an enormously dangerous threat to the safety and well-being of Jews in Israel, and indeed, by extension, Jews around the world.And unless one actually confronts this basic association of supremacy with safety, and the association of equality with subjugation or death, I don’t think you’re going to be able to understand or effectively respond to statements like Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, where he says New York is like Nazi Germany. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guests are Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative, and gubernatorial candidate, Ruwa Romman, who was denied the chance to speak at last year’s Democratic convention, and former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, co-host of the podcast, Pod Save the World.

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. We’ll talk about the New York mayoral race’s ramifications for the Israel-Palestine debate nationally. Our guests will be Palestinian-American Georgia State Representative, and gubernatorial candidate, Ruwa Romman, who was denied the chance to speak at last year’s Democratic convention, and former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes, co-host of the podcast, Pod Save the World.Cited in Today’s VideoThe Department of Justice alleged that Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed thirteen women.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Rhys Machold questions the “Start Up Nation” myth.Senator Rand Paul defends the Constitution against Donald Trump.The funeral of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, z’’l.Check out Arno Rosenfeld’s new Substack, Antisemitism Decoded.The Halachic Left on Parshat Lech Lecha.I discussed Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza on KALW public radio in the Bay Area.I’ll be speaking on November 3 at the University of Chicago, November 6 at Columbia Journalism School, and November 10 at Cornell University and Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York.See you Friday, PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, when I started writing my book, I didn’t think it would be about idolatry. I mean, I knew it would be about Israel and the destruction of Gaza, but it ended up kind of being a book about idolatry because the more I wrote it, the more I began to feel that the organized American Jewish community was willing to sacrifice almost anything to preserve unconditional support for the state of Israel, that every other value, every other principle was subordinated to that.And I’m seeing that so dramatically and, to me, in what is such a disgraceful way in the final days of this campaign against Zohran Mamdani. What are you willing to sacrifice in order to prevent a New York mayor who says that Israeli Jews and Palestinians should live equally under the same law? What are you willing to try to do to destroy such a candidate? The answer is: lie with almost anyone, do almost anything.Let’s just look at the examples. We have now all of these rabbis who have either explicitly or implicitly endorsed Andrew Cuomo to be next mayor of New York. This is a man who the Department of Justice found had sexually harassed 13 women, sexually harassed 13 women according to the Department of Justice. And you have rabbis telling their congregants that they need to overlook this and support this man.Do these rabbis ever think about what message that sends to the women in their own congregations who are being sexually harassed, who might look to a rabbi for pastoral care? Your message it sends to those women when your rabbi gets up and says, I want you to vote for the serial sexual harasser, what does it say about how much you care about women’s right to be free of sexual harassment?It says it is much less important to you than the principle of ensuring that Israel never faces accountability for its crimes under international law, even when those crimes have been widely acknowledged by the world’s leading genocide scholars, including many Israeli-born genocide scholars, right? That maintaining Israeli impunity to commit genocide and ensuring that Israel doesn’t have to face pressure for equality with Palestinians, that that is more important than the principle that sexual harassment is wrong and that sexual harassers should not be in high public office.What else are these Jewish leaders willing to sacrifice for the idolatry of unconditional support for the state of Israel? Well, complicity in a mass campaign of anti-Muslim bigotry. We’re daily deluged in the final days of this campaign by just the crudest, most vicious anti-Muslim bigotry against Zohran Mamdani. Now, I’m not saying that everyone who opposes Zohran Mamdani is an anti-Muslim bigot. Of course not.But I wonder whether it should at least give some of these Jewish leaders a little bit of pause that they have thrown in their lot with a candidate, Andrew Cuomo, who laughed and suggested with a radio talk show host that Zohran Mamdani would have applauded 9/11. This is the people with whom you are throwing in your lot, a viciously anti-Muslim bigoted campaign, and you’re saying, well, you know, opposing anti-Muslim bigotry is less important to me than preserving unconditional support for the state of Israel to be able to perpetuate what the world’s leading human rights organizations have termed as apartheid and genocide.And then there’s the question of American democracy, right? Because this mayoral election is not happening under ordinary circumstances, right? It’s happening amidst the potential authoritarian takeover and destruction of America’s system of liberal democracy by Donald Trump. And so, one thing you might really want to think about if you believe in liberal democracy is which candidate is more likely to stand up for the principle of liberal democracy: Andrew Cuomo, who has a history of kind of flirting with Donald Trump? Eric Adams, who was an ally of Donald Trump? Or Zohran Mamdani, who’s a very, very vehement, steadfast opponent of Donald Trump? That also turns out to be much less important to these Jewish leaders than opposing a candidate who was willing to try to hold Israel to the standards of international law.And it is extraordinary to see these rabbis and Jewish leaders describe Zohran Mamdani as a greater threat to Jewish New Yorkers and to the city and the country they love than Donald Trump. I’ve watched these videos put out by rabbis calling on their congregants not to vote for Zohran Mamdani, and I thought to myself, have they done similar videos about Donald Trump?If you act as I think the Jewish leadership of the institutional Jewish leadership of New York City and beyond has, as if Zohran Mamdani is a greater threat, more offensive, more of an emergency than Donald Trump, what does that say? It seems to me it’s pretty clear what it says. It says that you care more about preserving unconditional American support for Israel than you care about preserving America as a free country, a free country for you and your children.And this is something that we saw when AIPAC made this very clear when AIPAC endorsed dozens, if not hundreds, of members of Congress who had supported the January 6th insurrection and refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election. We saw this when the Anti-Defamation League in 2024 gave an award to Jared Kushner. That the American Jewish leadership, when faced with the question of what is really important to them, the preservation of America as a liberal democracy, even though it has been liberal democracy, which has been the foundation of American Jewish flourishing, it is the foundation of Jewish safety in the United States, that that is less important to them, less of a criteria for determining which candidates for public office they declare as emergencies and threats to the Jewish community than a candidate who is willing to say that he believes that his city, New York, should abide by the international courts’ indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu, and who abides by international legal scholars who say Israel’s committing genocide.And God forbid, God forbid, supports the principle that states should be based on equality under the law, irrespective of race, religion, and sex—the principle that American Jewish leadership supposedly believes in the United States, but turns out actually not to believe in it very much because they’re willing to fight much harder to ensure a system that denies equality under the law in Israel and Palestine than they are to try to defend a system of equality under the law in the United States. And so, they end up aligning with white Christian nationalist bigots who are turning America into an authoritarian society, and if they haven’t noticed, will ultimately also be a threat to Jews.Because fundamentally, what I think the anti-Mamdani campaign doesn’t understand in the Jewish community, just fundamentally doesn’t understand is something simple. If they’re willing to go after him as a Muslim, if they’re willing to go after trans people, if they’re willing to go after Black people, if people who are bigoted and have a view of America as a tribal white Christian nation in which everybody else has been subordinated, those people will get to Jews sooner or later.And the people who are best likely to be your best allies are the people who have a principled opposition to bigotry and a principled belief in human equality. That candidate actually is Zohran Mamdani. It’s not Andrew Cuomo. It’s certainly not Donald Trump. And yet it’s Zohran Mamdani who is considered to be the greatest threat to Jewish New Yorkers because the way they define threat is not actually what threatens the lives of Jewish New Yorkers. It’s what threatens the idolatry of the worship of a state whose political system is considered by many Jewish leaders to matter more than the lives of the people inside of that state, and indeed to matter more than the lives of many people in New York as well. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and author of the new book, Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990. With New York on the verge of electing a socialist, Muslim, anti-Zionist mayor, I ask Jonathan how the city has changed over the last three decades, and how those changes enabled the rise of Zohran Mamdani.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comKat Abughazaleh, the 26-year-old Palestinian-American running for Congress in Illinois’s Ninth District, has been federally indicted after being arrested at an ICE protest. We talk about that and about her vision for a revitalized Democratic Party.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and author of the new book, Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990. With New York on the verge of electing a socialist, Muslim, anti-Zionist mayor, I want to ask Jonathan how the city has changed over the last three decades, and how those changes enabled the rise of Zohran Mamdani.Ask Me AnythingOur next Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, will be this Tuesday, October 28, from Noon-1 PM Eastern time.Cited in Today’s VideoRabbi Ammiel Hirsch, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, and Bret Stephens attack Zohran Mamdani.According to CBS, Mamdani is winning 38 percent of the Jewish vote.According to the Washington Post, 39 percent of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide.Mamdani has called both Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin war criminals.When apartheid South Africa’s prime minister complained about “double standards.”Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Suzanne Schneider analyzes the Trump administration’s grant to a neoconservative Jewish group.Waleed Shahid on Mamdani’s lessons for Democrats.Nathan Thrall on what Israelis and Palestinians have learned since October 7.Rabbi David Polsky argues that starving Palestinians in Gaza violates Jewish law.I’ll be speaking on November 2 at Tzedek Chicago, November 6 at Columbia Journalism School, and November 10 at Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, New York.See you on Tuesday and Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, as we get near the New York mayoral race, the attacks on Zohran Mamdani have been become more intense, and in particular from a number of rabbis and Jewish commentators. And it’s really interesting to look carefully at the nature of these attacks on Mamdani to see what they say and what they don’t say.What you notice is the attacks on Mamdani do not actually engage in a substantive critique with any actual evidence against the positions that Mamdani has taken, for instance, that Israel’s committing genocide, or that the New York City should support the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, or that Israel should be a state that treats all its citizens equally rather than one that gives Jews legal superiority. None of these arguments are actually made. What you see instead is a series of techniques that are all designed to suggest—although not always explicitly—that basically Mamdani is an antisemite. And I think there are two particular ways that are worth noting about the way in which these claims of antisemitism are created.The first is that these critics—Jewish critics of Mamdani—posit that they speak for a Jewish consensus, a kind of Jewish pro-Israel consensus. And the fact that Mamdani is against that Jewish pro-Israel consensus is evidence that he has something against Jews, right? So, Rabbi Ammiel Hirsh did this video where he said that most Jews are deeply offended by Zohran Mamdani saying that Israel has committed genocide. Now, that itself is kind of interesting, right? Hirsch is not presenting any evidence that the claim is wrong. He’s simply saying that most Jews are offended. So, it’s a kind of like an identity claim argument, right, that there must be something problematic about this charge of genocide because most Jews are offended, i.e., this probably, you know, suggests some anti-Jewish animus on Mamdani’s part.But it’s just factually wrong, actually. The Washington Post just recently came out with a poll showed that 39 percent of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide; fifty one percent don’t. So, it’s not a majority of American Jews who think Israel is committing genocide. But it’s a quite large minority of American Jews, right. So, by taking this position, Zohran Mamdani is essentially siding with the more progressive wing of the American Jewish community over the more conservative wing of the American Jewish community, which is hardly surprising given that he’s a political progressive, right, that he is in a way exposing a very deep and increasingly bitter divide among Jews in New York and other places. In fact, it’s probably not a coincidence that Zohran Mamdani is getting about in the polls around 40% of the Jewish vote, running close to Andrew Cuomo, which is roughly the same percentage of Jews nationally think Israel’s committing genocide, right?But Ammi Hirsch can’t acknowledge that. He has to portray himself as kind of someone who speaks for Jews as a whole, right, even though nobody has elected him, right? Very few Jewish New Yorkers even know who he is. There’s no reason to believe that he would have the right to do that. But he has to do it in order to suggest that, by disagreeing with Ammiel Hirsch, that Mamdani disagrees with the vast majority of Jews and therefore has something against Jews.Similarly, in his column in the New York Times, Bret Stephens acknowledges, to his credit, that a Fox News poll shows that Mamdani is winning 38% of the Jewish vote. But then he suggests that these voters must be setting aside whatever reservations they might have about the candidates’ views on Israel. So, the only way in which Bret Stephens can imagine that Jews would be supporting Mamdani is to think that they’re doing so in spite of views on Israel. But in fact, the evidence suggests that that’s probably a plus for most of them. Again, after all, the polls show that roughly 40% of American Jews hold the views about Israel that Mamdani does. But Bret Stephens can’t really acknowledge that because that would completely reframe the argument, right, in which he wants to suggest that Mamdani is in opposition to the vast majority of Jews on Israel and, therefore, that that suggests that Mamdani has some problem with Jews.The second way in which you see this kind of argument of antisemitism being made, is that Mamdani is applying a set of double standards towards Israel, right? Again, it’s not an argument that what Mamdani is saying is wrong on the merits. It’s an argument that there must be some animus here because he’s so focused on Israel. So, Bret Stephens in his column writes, ‘one of the ways anti-Zionists tend to give themselves away as something darker,’ right—something darker is a pretty obvious euphemism for antisemite—’is that the only human rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s.’Here’s a tip. Whenever you notice a writer use the phrase seem, it usually suggests that they don’t actually have evidence for what they’re going to say, but they actually just want to kind of assert it because it seems that way to them. In fact, Zohran Mamdani actually does criticize a lot of other countries for their human rights abuses. He said that Vladimir Putin should also be indicted, that New York should also help indict Vladimir Putin at the International Criminal Court, support the ICC’s warrant against Vladimir Putin. He’s called Narendra Modi, India’s leader, a war criminal, right.And when he talks about Israel, Mamdani says again and again and again that his criticisms of Israel are based on his broad support for international law, and his belief in human rights, and his opposition to the idea of ethno-nationalist states. That’s the same reason that he doesn’t like Narendra Modi, because Narendra Modi is trying to turn India into a Hindu state. Mamdani doesn’t like the idea of states that are based on religious or ethnic or racial supremacy, which is why he opposes India being a Hindu state and Israel being a Jewish state, right?It’s actually pretty consistent in his worldview. In fact, I think you’d probably find that Zohar Mamdani, if you looked at something like U.S. arms sales to foreign countries, that Zohran Mamdani would be much, much more critical of many dictatorships than many of his pro-Israel critics. Many of his pro-Israel critics are actually big fans at this point of the dictatorships in, for instance, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt because those governments are fairly supportive of Israel. Mamdani actually is the one who, in accordance with the Semocratic Socialists of America, who’ve endorsed him, basically wants a radical reduction of arms sales to all dictatorships around the world.But the other thing is that the articles never acknowledge the possibility that one might speak more about Israel, right, and criticize Israel more for reasons that don’t have to do with antisemitism. And here are a couple, right? And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to think these out.First of all, the United States gives far more money, far more military support to Israel than any other country, and much more diplomatic support, right. So, of course, it makes more sense if you’re an American politician to care more about the human rights abuses that are being committed with American tax dollars than those that aren’t being committed with American tax dollars, right.It’s also the case that Zohran Mamdani simply gets asked relentlessly about Israel, right. He doesn’t get asked many questions about his views on the human rights condition in Myanmar. And that’s partly because people like Bret Stephens and Ammiel Hirsch don’t focus their concerns about Myanmar, right. I mean, one of the things that drives me crazy about all these arguments that basically people like Zohran Mamdani are focusing too much on human rights abuses in Israel is that there’s nothing stopping Zohran Mamdani’s critics from focusing their attention on human rights problems in Myanmar or Zimbabwe or Congo or Sudan or anyone else.But they’re not actually interested in those subjects. What they’re primarily interested in is defending Israel. And then because in their defense of

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit peterbeinart.substack.comOur guest is Gaza-born political analyst Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He’s been explaining why Trump’s ceasefire isn’t even a ceasefire, let alone a path to Palestinian freedom. And he’s been discussing the clashes inside Gaza between Hamas and Israeli-supported clans. We talked about the Trump plan, Gaza’s future, and the long-term consequences of this genocide.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe