They’re Trying to Muzzle the Jews—Again

The Anti-Defamation League is being harshly criticized for saying it will monitor the policies and appointments of incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It’s not the first time a political official and his supporters have tried to intimidate American Jews into silence.

There’s nothing objectively controversial about the ADL’s intentions. Its plan is to set up a website and a hotline to keep an eye on the Mamdani administration. It’s not as if the ADL is mobilizing a militia to storm Gracie Mansion.

There is good reason to monitor Mamdani. His response to the October 7 Hamas massacres and gang-rapes was to serve as a featured speaker at anti-Israel rallies, surrounded by signs calling for “Intifada Revolution.” He says Israel should stop being a Jewish state. He has pledged to take anti-Israel steps as mayor, such as halting the city’s purchase of Israel Bonds. As a New York State assemblyman, he introduced a bill to strip some pro-Israel organizations of their tax-exempt status.

Moreover, Mamdani’s circle of supporters includes outspoken Israel-haters such as Linda Sarsour—infamous for saying “Nothing is creepier than Zionism”—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose executive director said he was “happy to see” the Hamas invasion of Israel. So of course Jewish groups such as the ADL should be watching.

Mamdani’s fans are hopping mad over the ADL’s monitoring plan. J Street has accused the ADL of “sowing panic” and “demonizing” the mayor-elect. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough confronted ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt on air, urging him to “call Mamdani’s team” and “have lunch and talk,” instead of monitoring Mamdani’s actions. An overheated news article in the New York Times portrayed the ADL’s modest monitoring plan as an example of the group’s supposed strategy of adopting “a conciliatory approach to the far right.” The ADL’s opponents evidently are hoping their criticism will intimidate the ADL into silence.

Muzzling the Jews is a well-worn political strategy. During the 1930s and 1940s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his aides repeatedly pressured the foremost American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, to refrain from criticizing U.S. policy regarding the plight of Europe’s Jews.

In one instance, Wise confided to a friend that the president spoke to him about “the necessity of Jews lying low.” On another occasion, Roosevelt warned Wise that if Jewish leaders were too vocal, it would “enable Americans to say that the fellows who wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had some justification.”

President Roosevelt and his aides successfully pressed Wise to: withhold support from a congressional resolution about Hitler’s mistreatment of German Jews (1933); cancel a “public trial” of Hitler in Chicago (1934); refrain from calling for admission of more Jewish refugees to the U.S. (1938-1939); drop calls to admit refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands (1940); testify against a congressional resolution urging FDR to create a rescue agency (1943); and soften or halt his public criticism of Great Britain for shutting the doors to Palestine.

But FDR’s muzzling campaign didn’t work on everybody. The activists known as the Bergson Group organized rallies, lobbied in Washington, and sponsored more than two hundred full-page newspaper advertisements urging the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jews.

Bergson Group activist Ben Hecht, the noted playwright, authored many of those newspaper ads. One was in the form of a poem that he called “The Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe.” It read, in part:

            Four million Jews waiting for death

            Oh hang and burn but—quiet, Jews!

            Don’t be bothersome; save your breath—

            The world is busy with other news.

Stephen Wise’s silence is remembered today as a tragic example of failed Jewish leadership. Ben Hecht’s outcry, by contrast, shines as an example of Jewish activists who refused to be muzzled.

It goes without saying that there are many important differences between the circumstances of 1943 and those of today. But the pressure that the Anti-Defamation League faces today has a precedent, as does the choice that the ADL must now make. Which path will it choose? Will it go forward with the website and hotline to monitor Mamdani, or will it be intimidated into silence?