Day: November 11, 2025

Planning An Exit Strategy

Dear Editor:

Mamdani is Mayor and there is nothing we can do about it. Fighting Jews who supported him will get us nowhere. Is this the age of gloom for New York and will Jews see unstoppable Anti-Semitism.? Many say run to Florida. The only place to run to is Israel. For the present stay in New York. Mamdani will change his tune when he takes office and will be advancing his political career; he wants to succeed and be re-elected in four years. We live in an age of violence; he will watch his step when he gets into power. By the way, I believe he eventually will be seeking higher office. This is not pre-1933 Germany nor a possible Jewish Genocide.

This is a time to plan an exit strategy. Buy an apartment, Get Israeli citizenship. Stay in America as long as you can, but antisemitism is now mainstream. The danger is real and existential.

Sincerely
Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg

Mamdani is Preparing for the Caliphate

Dear Editor:

There is a straight line from 9-11 to Oct. 7 and to Nov. 4. It is the path of Christianity’s submission to Russia and radical Islam.

In 1956, the U.S. withdrew from the New Aswan Dam project, as Egypt was becoming closer to the Soviet Union. The Soviets saw Israel as a western outpost. In 1964, to further diminish American influence in the Middle East and North Africa, the KGB and Egypt created the Palestinian myth.

They recruited fighters from throughout MENA, calling them Palestinians. They appropriated Jewish history as their own and employed terrorism do drive home their message. They partnered with Iran and Qatar, home of the Muslim Brotherhood, to fund Islamic terrorism world-wide and to support the Jihadis encircling Israel. Qatar and Saudi Arabia bought into and controlled our Ivy League universities.

The Soviet Union, now Russia, holds the reigns to the propaganda apparatus. On October 8, 2023, one day after Palestinian war criminals ravished the Gaza Envelope, 40,000 dormant social media sites sprung into action. Universities in America, Canada and Europe were taken over by Islamists. Jewish students were harassed, while no government or university administration intervened to protect them. Islamists marched through the streets. It was the 1930’s again. Not until Trump’s election did anyone care.

Now Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of New York, the city with the largest Jewish population. He is openly a Jew-hater. He is a communist in the world’s banking center. He will bring New York to its knees in preparation for the Caliphate. He has Obama’s blessing.

Europe and Canada are pretty well lost. Will America fight back against the Brotherhood?

Sincerely,
Len Bennett, Author of ‘Unfinished Work’
Deerfield Beach, FL

It’s Not All in Their Heads

Dear Editor:

Cornell University has reached a settlement with the Department of Justice concerning anti-Israel protests on its campus which—as the New York Times put it— “made Jewish students on campus fearful.”

In reality, the problem was not just Jewish fears, but numerous statements and actions, some of them violent, that targeted Jewish students at Cornell following the Hamas invasion of Israel two years ago.

— A student threatened to shoot and stab Jewish students in Cornell’s kosher dining hall.

— The campus Hillel received death threats and other vulgar messages.

— Anti-Israel extremists smashed glass doors at Day Hall and defaced it with menacing graffiti.

— A mob rioted at a campus career fair because a few of the exhibitors had connections to Israel.

— Several Cornell professors openly cheered the October 7 mass-murder, mocked and denied the Hamas gang-rapes of Israeli women, and posted obscene messages about Israel and Zionism.

It was not all just in the Jewish students’ heads. The atmosphere was so hostile to Jewish students that at one point in the autumn of 2023, the university administration felt it necessary to temporarily cancel all classes.

Unfortunately, this is becoming something of a pattern at the New York Times. A news article on October 23 about anti-Israel activity on campuses reported that some American Jewish college students have complained “that some chants and other acts felt antisemitic.”

The assertion that Jewish students merely “felt” the chants or signs were antisemitic implied that they might not have been antisemitic, but were simply perceived that way by some observers.

It’s not a matter of what Jewish students have “felt,” but what has actually been happening for the past two years on university campuses around the country:

— Physical assaults, harassment and taunting of Jewish students, including slurs such as “kike Zionists” (at Ohio State University) and “Go back to Poland!” (at Columbia University).

— Swastika-daubings on the facilities of campus Jewish organizations such as Hillel.

— Preventing Jewish students from accessing some public areas on campuses.

— Mobs marching with banners celebrating the Hamas massacre of 1200 Israeli Jews and calling for the annihilation of millions more. Let’s not forget that President Joe Biden, in a tweet on June 8, 2024, specifically cited rallies “celebrating the 10/7 attack” as examples of recent “horrific acts of Antisemitism.”

Sincerely,
Prof. Rafael Medoff

Jews Should Not Flee NYC

Dear Editor:

While Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City has rightly stirred concern within the Jewish community, particularly given his hostility toward Israel and his alignment with radical socialist movements, fleeing the city would be both a strategic and moral mistake. New York has long been the beating heart of American Jewish life — a place where our community’s cultural, intellectual, and spiritual influence has shaped the city’s very character. To abandon it now would be to surrender that legacy to those who would erase it.

Rather than retreating, Jews must remain firmly rooted and resolute. We must organize, speak out, and hold this administration accountable — in the press, in civic forums, and through the ballot box. Silence and flight only embolden extremism. Engagement, unity, and courage will contain it.

Our forebears did not build thriving Jewish communities in New York through comfort or avoidance; they did so through perseverance and faith in democratic principles. The way to confront Mayor Mamdani’s dangerous anti-Israel and socialist agenda is not by withdrawing from public life but by doubling our commitment to it.

New York’s Jewish story is one of resilience. That must not change now.

Respectfully,
Jeremy Kornfinkel
Monroe, NY

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on The Jewish Voice.

By: Michael Belling

N10 marks a double anniversary of the consequences of two different expressions of “the oldest hatred” in the world—the hatred of the Jews—50 years since the lowest point in the history of the United Nations with the passage of the “Zionism is racism” resolution and 87 years after the horrors of Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9-10, which marked the beginning of the Nazi industry developed to kill all Jews.

The events typify two aspects of the eliminationist ideology that has dogged and often dominated Jewish history for millennia. Christian and Muslim anti-Judaism sought the conversion of the Jews, while the Nazis were bent on their physical destruction. The U.N. canard was a move toward destroying the Jewish homeland and depriving Jews of their identity as a people using secular terminology, while the Holocaust was an attempt to wipe Jews out physically.

Both have deep roots—going back to biblical times—but they still flourish today. Much of what has emerged since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, reflects the harsh reality of their continued presence virtually throughout the world.

Part of the reason is that hostility toward the Jews takes on many forms at in different times, largely expressed in terms of what different societies regarded as their supreme values and ideas, what they identified as the greatest threats to them, and what is defined as the major evils and challenges facing them.

Former Commonwealth Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, in an address to the European Parliament in September 2016, referred to “the mutating virus: understanding antisemitism.”

He said: “Throughout history, when people have sought to justify antisemitism, they have done so by recourse to the highest source of authority available within the culture. In the Middle Ages, it was religion. So we had religious anti-Judaism. In post-Enlightenment Europe, it was science. So we had the twin foundations of Nazi ideology, Social Darwinism and the so-called Scientific Study of Race. Today, the highest source of authority worldwide is human rights. That is why Israel—the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and independent judiciary—is regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide.”

Since World War II, human rights have become virtually a secular religion in the West and serve to promote the latest incarnation of the mutating virus: accusing Israel of the five cardinal sins against human rights mentioned by Sacks, plus the addition of declaring Israel and Zionism the new Nazism.

This led directly to the 1975 U.N. resolution and served to justify the worldwide anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and frequently, openly anti-Jewish demonstrations in many countries.

Most people involved in this campaign seem to be unaware that, in doing so, they are echoing and reinforcing the old Soviet antisemitic and anti-Zionist propaganda campaigns. Those vile campaigns date back to at least 1967, when the Arab clients of the Soviet Union suffered an ignominious defeat following their aggression against the State of Israel.

Russian rulers feared a revival in the godless Communist country of Jewish consciousness and identification, which they felt could threaten their doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist totalitarian and atheist philosophy—the reason for the existence of the Soviet state.

The Soviet leaders referred it to the KGB propaganda and disinformation department, hoping to discredit the unwelcome Jewish renaissance and put a stop to it. They clearly felt that they had to undermine Israel and Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement.

The KGB probably felt it could not use religious anti-Jewish accusations, as the Soviet Union had no religion other than communism. Racist antisemitism had been discredited after Hitler. So they hit on the modern, post-World War II themes of human rights, inverting Hitler’s real race hatred and coming up with the totally baseless claim that Zionism is racism.

This Big Lie was accepted with alacrity and promoted by Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies who, along with the Soviet Union, were the leading proponents of Jew-hatred after 1945. With the Soviet bloc, these countries had an automatic majority in the major international organizations, which they used to advance this claim. In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly passed its resolution.

Calls for the end of the Jewish state are part of the new antisemitism. The old antisemitism denied Jews rights as individuals. In its newest incarnation, Jew-hatred denies the right of the Jewish state to exist among the family of nations and of Jews to have a state like any other people.

Sixteen years later in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the General Assembly came to its senses on the issue and repealed the resolution, something never done before or since.

Unfortunately, the saga of this Big Lie did not end there. It was resuscitated with additions and refinements a mere 10 years later in all its poisonous hatred at the notorious, so-called Durban anti-racism conference in 2001, officially the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, under the auspices of the United Nations.

The conference was hijacked by vile Jew-hatred and anti-Israel rhetoric, including antisemitic pamphlets and the distribution of the worst false accusation of the previous century—a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Durban became a launching pad for fresh and vicious acts—from the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign to open campus antisemitism and hateful genocide accusations brought by South Africa to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. They reared their head again soon after the Oct. 7 genocidal attack on Israel on by Hamas, aimed at killing as many civilians as possible bringing Israel’s other enemies in the region, particularly Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon, into a war finally to destroy the Jewish state.

Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and even the Palestinian Authority, which governs much of Judea and Samaria, show no signs of accepting a Jewish state in any borders whatsoever and have remained consistent in their objective to destroy Israel totally.

The letter, spirit and hatred of the two Nov. 10 events live on today. Repetition of falsehoods may get them believed, but the truth is that Zionism is not a dirty word. It is no more than the Jewish national liberation movement for the right of self-determination, like other peoples, in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.

In spite of their persistence, it is important for Jews to remember that ultimately, neither antisemitic effort has succeeded. The Jews are still here, while their persecutors have disappeared one by one, including the most powerful empires of their times.

The sheer clamor of Jew-hatred might at times appear overwhelming, yet it is important to state at least three positives that speak louder than the antisemitic shrieks and threats:

Israel is today stronger than ever;

The solid wall of Arab opposition to Israel that stood so firm for many years now has several large holes in it: peace with Egypt since 1978 and with Jordan since 1994, and, most encouragingly, the 2020 Abraham Accords that brought peace between Israel and Bahrain, the United Aram Emirates, Morocco and Sudan—accords that survived the recent Gaza war and show signs of expanding to include Kazakhstan and perhaps Saudi Arabia;

Jews not allowing others to determine who and what they are. In the words of Chaim Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, in response to the Zionism is racism resolution: “I do not come to this rostrum to defend the moral and historical values of the Jewish people. They do not need to be defended. They speak for themselves. They have given to mankind much of what is great and eternal. They have done for the spirit of man more than can readily be appreciated by a forum such as this one.”

          (JNS.org)

Michael Belling is a freelance journalist who has written widely on the Middle East. He was formerly an advocate and foreign correspondent for a South African media group in Israel

The post Marking Extreme Malice: Kristallnacht and UN Racism Resolution appeared first on The Jewish Voice.

Antisemites on the right are reading from the same anti-Israel playbook as their left-wing foes. Is this the future of the Republican and Democratic parties?

By: Jonathan S. Tobin

More than a week after former Fox News host and current political commentator Tucker Carlson hosted neo-Nazi “groyper” Nick Fuentes on his podcast, the controversy he set off hasn’t just had legs. It has created what seems like a schism on the right.

The Heritage Foundation think tank—one of the cornerstones of the modern conservative movement—seemed to be engaging in a civil war over first its president’s defense of Carlson and then the way he tried to walk back that stand at a town meeting of its employees—something that spoke volumes about the way hostility to Israel and the Jews seemed to be simmering among some of its younger staff members. In response to this, some Jewish organizations and others that had been part of Heritage’s important efforts to support Israel, as well as to combat antisemitism via its “Project Esther,” decided that they had no alternative but to resign and disassociate themselves from the group.

Argument on the right

Popular conservative podcasters like Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh doubled down on their refusal to condemn Carlson’s latest instance of promoting antisemitism or the even crazier stands of far-right political commentator Candace Owens, continuing to assert a stance of neutrality when it came to a debate among conservatives who are for and against antisemitism. Meanwhile, other leading voices on the right, including members of the Senate and the House, disagreed, saying they saw no problem with not only saying that “Hitler is bad,” but also that Carlson and his far-right fans are doing great damage to the right and President Donald Trump.

Indeed, Kelly hosted Carlson in a live show in White Plains, N.Y., on Nov. 6, during which he doubled down on the interview with Fuentes, saying the neo-Nazi was “the single most influential commentator among young men.” He also said that U.S. and Western civilization had nothing to do with the legacy of the Hebrew Bible, falsely claiming that Israel committed “genocide” in a way that marked it as different from any nation at war. He further claimed that a Republican Jewish congressman—Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who had said that all of the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 massacre should die, was “worse” than the Hitler and Stalin-loving Fuentes.

This is a lot for even those who have followed Carlson’s career arc over the last few years to process. But what many people failed to see was that the far bigger news event of the week confirmed that for all of their differences, Carlson and his pals have a lot more in common with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani than they do with the overwhelming majority of Republicans and conservatives.

That was confirmed when Carlson’s newsletter greeted the election of a Democratic Socialist as the head of America’s largest city by highlighting the fact that a minority of New York Jews voted for Mamdani. From Tucker’s point of view, Mamdani isn’t so bad because the new mayor of Gotham shares his loathing for Israel and a willingness to tolerate Jews, only if they renounce a key part of Jewish identity and Judaism that is bound to the land of Israel. That fits the views of the minority of left-wing Jewish voters in deep-blue New York who cast ballots for an antisemite because they likely see it as in keeping with their universalist values and distaste for sectarian elements of their heritage.

Not ‘America First’

The similarly minded American Conservative magazine published a piece the same day, also excusing Mamdani because they considered his obsession with destroying the Jewish state to be just fine. According to its convoluted reasoning, Israel’s war against Islamists has nothing to do with the threat to America from the same groups because the Jews aren’t really part of the West and ought to be cut loose by Washington. Like Carlson, the magazine is primarily interested in justifying anything and anyone who will break up the U.S.-Israel relationship. For them, America’s alliance with the only democracy in the Middle East is peculiarly obnoxious in a way that ties with, for example, Tucker’s Muslim Brotherhood-sponsoring friends from Qatar are not.

This fits in with a growing chorus of defenders of Carlson on the far right that insist that the only reason why the commentator is being criticized is because of his foreign-policy views, rather than his comfort with or support for Jew-hatred.

The truth is that Carlson and others on the far right aren’t really supporters of Trump’s “America First” vision. Some characterize their views as “America Only,” though that is a misnomer. It isn’t strictly speaking isolationist so much as it is just obsessed with isolating Israel and the Jews. Tucker is perfectly happy to embrace foreign nations like President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Iran or Qatar. It’s just Israel—and its Jewish and evangelical Christian supporters—that get up his nose and cause him to label them “heretics” suffering from a “brain virus.”

Others on the antisemitic right, like comedian/podcaster Dave Smith, are blaming Israel and the Jews for the Republican setbacks on Election Day, improbably theorizing that the GOP would have done better in blue states like California, Virginia and New Jersey if only Trump hadn’t bombed Iran or supported the Jewish state’s fight for survival against genocidal Islamist terrorists. As always, Jews are the perfect scapegoats for whatever upsets those who are obsessed with them.

In many ways, this worldview is a far cry from that of Mamdani, who is a creature of the anti-American mindset of his parents and other ideological mentors who see the world through the prism of toxic left-wing ideas, such as critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism.

Blaming the Jews

It also needs to be restated that the crisis of antisemitism on the left is, at least at this point, far more serious than on the right. Democratic officeholders like Mamdani and congressional progressives, who appear to be the party’s future, are the ones who have turned on Israel and stand ready to defend the open Jew-hatred of the “globalize the intifada” mobs. Among conservatives, there are some podcasters (however huge their audiences) and people working at a think tank who embrace views that are anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic. But the overwhelming majority of Republican officeholders remain ardent supporters of the Jewish state. As journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote in The Free Press, the argument on the right is largely one between influencers who want clicks on the internet and those who want votes for Republicans and, for that reason, shun antisemites.

In yet another confirmation of the horseshoe theory of politics, the far left and the far right share an antipathy for Israel and the Jews. Both see them as the linchpin of whatever they believe is the world’s greatest problem. For Mamdani, eradicating the Jewish state is the key to achieving the dismantling of worldwide imperialism and capitalism. For Carlson, isolating Israel and anathematizing its Jewish and Christian supporters as being guilty of “dual loyalty” will enable the United States to reach a Christian nationalist nirvana where no “globalist” forces can spread their malign influence. That is irrespective of the fact that it is the actual globalist movement of the left that seeks to undermine American national sovereignty and erase Israel in the name of woke values.

Such views ought to be relegated to the fever swamps of the far left and far right, but in the last two years, since the Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, they have gone mainstream.

We already knew that bastions of the left, like elite universities or the newsroom of The New York Times, had already embraced the falsehood that Israel was an illegitimate “apartheid” state and mimicked blood libels about it committing “genocide” because that was in line with woke ideology. What many of us hadn’t realized until recently was the inroads the right-wing version of these antisemitic myths had made in conservative circles.

Trouble among youth

Carlson’s cozy interview in which he helped spread Fuentes’ toxic Jew-hatred and bizarre support for both Hitler and Stalin was one thing. But as those who listened to the leaked tape of the Heritage town hall or have seen videos of questions asked at Turning Point USA events asked at the University of Mississippi and Auburn University of figures such as Vice President JD Vance, or Eric and Lara Trump, the virus of Jew-hatred is spreading. It’s clear that some young people on the right now believe that there is something deeply sinister about American support for the survival of the one Jewish state on the planet.

What makes it even more worrisome is the talking point being floated in such forums that the U.S.-Israel alliance is somehow at odds with Christian faith. This makes no sense because Jews and Christians, as well as supporters of Israel, have a common cause in defending Judeo-Christian values. It is the woke, often agnostic left that seeks to tear down the edifice built on the wisdom of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome that is the foundation of Western civilization.

This goes beyond the question of whether Vance—the most likely successor to Trump in the GOP—is or isn’t someone who shares these views. Rather, it is one about whether the effort to single out Israel and the Jews as the source of the nation’s problems is gaining traction among a generation that gets their information about the world from TikTok and other social media. They have no real knowledge of the facts about the Jewish state and the false claims rooted in traditional tropes of Jew-hatred that its supporters are manipulating Americans against their own interests.

What conservatives, young or old, need to remember is that the Western values they purport to honor and seek to defend against the left are as incompatible with the obsessions of Carlson and the groypers about the Jews as they are with Mamdani’s democratic socialism and woke opposition to Zionism as a manifestation of “white” oppression.

Instead of defending right-wing Jew-hatred masquerading as a defense of America, they should see it as no different from the toxic myths of the left that also focus on Israel as the font of the world’s troubles. If not, then both major U.S. political parties may be heading toward a future in which they will share unhealthy obsessions with both the Jews and those who hate America and the West.

(JNS.org)

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

The post Tucker Carlson and Zohran Mamdani Have a Lot in Common appeared first on The Jewish Voice.