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Zohran Mamdani and the Paradox That Isn’t

The antisemitism on the socialist left isn’t an unfortunate excess, or a “blind spot,” but the unforgivable feature that gives the whole game away.
[additional-authors]
July 2, 2025
Zohran Mamdani (Yuki Iwamura-Pool/Getty Images); Jeremy Corbyn (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

I’ll just say it: I would like to support a $30 an hour minimum wage. Rent freezes that help struggling people. Free public transportation so meager paychecks aren’t eaten away simply getting to jobs. I’ll also confess that I don’t understand basic economics, which may be why I feel a tug of sympathy for such policies even after people who do understand economics—people I respect, whose good will I believe in—explain why they don’t work and will in fact make living conditions worse for the people they’re supposed to help. I want them to succeed and have a religious kind of faith that the money exists for them. When your country’s debt is $36.2 trillion and growing by $8.5 billion a day, every hour the nation survives seems a miracle. So why not free childcare?

Which means that despite my better judgment, I understand some of the enthusiasm for Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor last week. Clearly much of his fan base is thrilled about Mamdani’s support for BDS, and his vow to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in the Big Apple. Yet they don’t necessarily love these things—they may be motivated by closer-to-home, economic, seemingly virtuous concerns. 

But there it is: On the one hand, stirring rhetoric about hope and justice and helping the downtrodden; on the other hand, an obsession with malevolent, bloodthirsty Israel that can only be called antisemitism. Is this a paradox? Or is one actually the corollary of the other? 

These are questions near to my heart. Not many  years ago, while living in London, I joined the Labour Party to support Jeremy Corbyn. After doing the unimaginable, however—fact-checking my anti-Zionist beliefs—I realized with horror, however belatedly, that Corbyn was, as British Jews said, an antisemite. 

Like Mamdani, Corbyn talked about socialism, and as a socialist I was thrilled. But also like Mamdani, Corbyn said it was a moral imperative to side with the Palestinians against Zionism, and I’d finally realized this was just a cover for antisemitism—that vilifying Zionism is itself a form of antisemitism. 

I’d been a socialist my entire adult life. Weird as my political group looked to outsiders, it gave my life an intense sense of purpose. It allowed me to transcend—I imagined—my life of privilege, through vicarious solidarity with the world’s powerless. It gave me a thrilling mythology, heroes and martyrs who’d fought under the red banner for the liberation of mankind. I still wanted the promise of socialism—just without the Jew-hatred. Surely that’s possible?

I returned to school, and I wrote my master’s thesis about antisemitism and the left. The facts were unassailable: Socialism and antisemitism have always gone hand in hand. Hostility to Jews is implicit in Marxism’s very project: a mobilization of the oppressed against the rich capitalists, who have always been identified (rightly or not) with the Jews.  

Hostility to Jews is implicit in Marxism’s very project: a mobilization of the oppressed against the rich capitalists, who have always been identified (rightly or not) with the Jews. 

Marx wrote revoltingly about Jews. Late nineteenth-century European Socialists flirted occasionally with antisemitic movements, seeing them as incipiently anti-capitalist. The Communists did the same while the Nazis gained in popularity, and after the war took to executing Soviet Jews as “Zionist agents.” The Trotskyists, members of the Marxist tendency I’d belonged to for so many years, sometimes criticized Stalinist and Islamist antisemitism but were among the most vitriolic anti-Zionist antisemites of all. 

Having learned this history, I hoped to convince the left to recognize its antisemitism and take it seriously. I still considered myself to be on the left—part of the community of good people, the compassionate souls who care about the poor and oppressed. I found, however, that by expressing alarm about antisemitism, I’d exiled myself from their warming companionship. Apparently carping about this subject made me that loathsome thing, a right-winger. 

The more tolerant of my London university mates listened with seeming sympathy when I explained why I thought Corbyn was antisemitic. But really, they were just waiting for my lips to stop moving. They had one, maybe two, burning questions to ask me. Maybe it’s true, they’d say. Maybe Corbyn does have a blind spot about antisemitism. But surely you aren’t going to vote for the Tories? How much does antisemitism matter, really, compared to all the other terrible things in our society? 

I might have pointed them to Dostoyevsky. In “The Brothers Karamazov,” his character Ivan poses a question. “Imagine,” Ivan says, “that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that child beating its breast with its fist, for instance—in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?” Ivan’s brother Alyosha answers no. I’d think that any moral person would. 

And yet the socialist vision is premised on something along these lines, with the Jews being that child beating its breast—not necessarily weak and pitiable, not necessarily tortured to death, but removed from the rest of society, condemned, and marked for, potentially, torture and extermination.

Socialists claim they target Jews because Jews are rich and powerful; others in history have loathed Jews for being poor and weak. Hated for being capitalists, and hated for being Communists. The pretext doesn’t matter. Antisemitism—all antisemitism—claims an entire people must be designated  “it” in order that the rest of humanity may achieve total emancipation and fulfilment. 

There’s no way to erect a just society on this basis, and any movement that doesn’t see this is rotten to its core. The antisemitism on the socialist left–Mamdani, Corbyn and the rest—isn’t an unfortunate excess, or a “blind spot,” but the unforgivable feature that gives the whole game away.

The protests of British Jews were instrumental in bringing down Corbyn—I was lucky to be there to see it happen. Widespread suspicion that the Labour leader was a bigot brought the party into more disrepute than it was worth, and ultimately a new leader had to be found. The British left is still shot through with antisemitism; in these nightmarish post-October 7 days, it’s worse than ever. The UK government under the new Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has been increasingly hostile to Israel and tolerant of the antisemitic hordes marauding through British streets. Corbyn still tweets and pontificates in Parliament about the diabolical Zionists, and he still has a devoted following. His power is a shadow of what it used to be, though, and that’s a victory worth noting. 

Mamdani can be defeated too, and he must. It falls to New Yorkers to put forward and mobilize around a worthy alternative candidate, but it’s everybody’s responsibility to fight the poison of antisemitism. Even—or especially—when it comes cloaked in virtue.


Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”

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