“Jews for Mamdani” and the Tragic Repetition: Why Some Jews Turn Against Themselves

Throughout Jewish history, there’s been a strange and heartbreaking pattern: Jews who, for political or ideological reasons, champion movements and leaders whose victory would ensure their own destruction. Across centuries, the phenomenon has appeared in varied guises — religious zealotry, political radicalism, cultural assimilation — yet the underlying psychology has remained remarkably constant.

The biblical prophets already saw it. Jeremiah warned the people of Judah not to seek salvation in Egypt against Babylon’s might, yet they insisted on doing precisely that, ensuring their ruin. “You rely on a broken reed of a staff,” he thundered (Jer. 36:6). They mistook servility for strategy.

During the Roman siege of Jerusalem, the Zealots — self-proclaimed defenders of Jewish pride — destroyed the city’s food stores, believing that God would perform a miracle. In their fanatical pursuit of ideological purity, they guaranteed starvation and defeat. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai’s escape from Jerusalem and the birth of Yavneh were not triumphs of rebellion, but rescues from self-immolation.

In Spain after 1391, thousands of Jews converted to Christianity, some to save their lives, others to climb socially. Yet as the historian Heinrich Graetz observed, the conversos often became the fiercest persecutors of their former brethren. The Inquisition was staffed by men of Jewish origin eager to prove their loyalty to their new masters by surpassing them in cruelty.

Centuries later, Jewish Marxists in the early Soviet Union joined the Yevsektsiya — the “Jewish Section” of the Communist Party — which zealously closed synagogues, banned Hebrew study, and denounced Zionists as bourgeois traitors. The revolution that promised a “new world” devoured them; Stalin’s purges consumed the very Jews who had enforced his atheistic creed.

In Germany, the tragedy reached its apogee. Many German Jews, anxious to be accepted as “Germans of Mosaic persuasion,” derided Zionism as parochial and obsolete. They believed that assimilation would earn them security. Yet when Hitler came to power, no level of denial could protect them. Their faith in universalism was mocked by a regime that reduced them to racial outcasts.

Why does this pattern recur? The answer, in part, lies in the psychology of oppression. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm called it the “escape from freedom”: when liberty is frightening, individuals surrender autonomy to the very forces that dominate them. Anna Freud coined a related concept — “identification with the aggressor” — the victim’s desperate need to win safety by imitating his tormentor.

When liberty is frightening, individuals surrender autonomy to the very forces that dominate them. Anna Freud coined a related concept — “identification with the aggressor” — the victim’s desperate need to win safety by imitating his tormentor.

The Jewish historical experience, marked by long centuries of marginalization, made this temptation ever-present. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in his book “Zakhor,” observed that Jewish memory oscillates between pride and shame. In times of persecution, shame can overwhelm memory; Jews seek relief not in defiance but in disavowal. To be accepted, they condemn their own.

This psychological inversion can even masquerade as morality. Hannah Arendt, writing on totalitarianism, warned that the moral sensibility of the oppressed can be twisted into “the perverse desire to stand always on the side of the victimizer in order to remain innocent.” For many Jews, especially in liberal Western societies, defending Jewish particularism feels parochial; denouncing Israel seems cosmopolitan. The historian Robert Wistrich called it “the temptation of universalism.” Because Judaism values justice, Jews are drawn to universalist movements. But when universalism erases the right of Jews to defend themselves or to exist as a people, it becomes an ideological weapon turned inward. The dream of belonging to “humanity” ends in the nightmare of disappearance.

Because Judaism values justice, Jews are drawn to universalist movements. But when universalism erases the right of Jews to defend themselves or to exist as a people, it becomes an ideological weapon turned inward. The dream of belonging to “humanity” ends in the nightmare of disappearance.

Bruno Bettelheim, the psychoanalyst and survivor of Dachau, wrote that some prisoners internalized their oppressors’ contempt so deeply that they believed cooperation or submission would grant them moral superiority. Bettelheim termed it “moral masochism” — suffering as proof of virtue. Many Jews in modern political movements unconsciously reenact that posture: they measure their righteousness by how loudly they condemn their own.

In contemporary progressive circles, moral legitimacy is often won by one’s willingness to denounce “privilege” and “colonialism.” Jews, anxious to remain on the side of the righteous, sometimes absorb the vocabulary of their critics and turn it against their own existence. When Israel — the only Jewish state on earth — is branded a colonial aggressor, these Jews rush to agree, believing that by joining the accusers they can escape accusation.

This ancient self-destructive impulse has found a new stage in American politics through figures such as Zohran Mamdani, a New York State assemblyman of Ugandan-Indian origin and a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Mamdani has accused Israel of “apartheid,” called for ending U.S. aid to the Jewish state, and aligned himself with organizations that justify terrorism as “resistance.”

Mamdani’s hostility to Israel is no secret. What is shocking is the number of Jews who champion him — donating to his campaigns, endorsing him on social media, and treating his denunciations as moral insight. For them, his approval offers validation: if an anti-Zionist progressive praises them, they feel liberated from the burden of collective loyalty.

But to imagine that joining Mamdani’s cause elevates Jewish ethics is to ignore history’s harsh lessons. The zealots of Jerusalem also believed they were the true defenders of holiness. The conversos of Spain believed they were saving their souls. The Jewish communists of the Yevsektsiya believed they were liberating mankind. Each sought redemption through self-negation; each brought catastrophe upon themselves and their people.

To align with those who demonize Israel today is to repeat their mistake. For the Jewish people, Israel is not a political accessory; it is the vessel of survival. To undermine it is to erode the foundation upon which Jewish life everywhere depends. Those who claim to act in the name of “justice” while excusing Hamas massacres or delegitimizing Jewish self-defense reveal not compassion, but moral confusion.

Jewish tradition teaches, “He who is compassionate to the cruel will end by being cruel to the compassionate.” (Midrash Tanchuma, Metzora 1). The prophets of universalism who defend those who slaughter Jews commit precisely that inversion. They imagine themselves moral visionaries but become unwitting agents of cruelty.

The Book of Psalms warns, “They loved death more than life.” The Jewish impulse to seek virtue through self-destruction is a spiritual illness — a longing to dissolve into the universal at the cost of existence itself. What begins as moral idealism ends as national suicide.

The historian Salo Baron once decried what he called “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” the obsession with suffering. Yet the current wave of Jewish self-denunciation is not lachrymose but suicidal. It transforms compassion into complicity and repentance into erasure.

The antidote is not chauvinism but clarity. Judaism has never taught blind nationalism. It teaches the sanctity of life, the dignity of every human being — and the obligation of self-preservation. The Talmudic dictum “Your life comes first” (Bava Metzia 62a) is not selfishness; it is sanity. Without survival, there is no morality.

Mamdani and his Jewish admirers stand at a moral crossroads. They can choose the comfort of fashionable virtue or the courage of historical truth. The first leads to applause from the world; the second ensures that there will still be a Jewish people to hear the applause.

The choice, as history repeatedly teaches, is not between Right and Left, but between memory and amnesia, between moral posturing and moral survival.

For the sake of our future, we must at last break the cycle of Jewish self-destruction — before history, yet again, repeats its judgment.