Poland’s Eternal Third Rail: Jews

The incoming mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, has assembled his Rotisserie League team of political advisors, all of whom, not surprisingly, are certified antisemites with minors in anti-Zionist, pro-Hamas advocacy.

New York Jews should ready themselves to get roasted.

Surely not in the manner of the Third Reich, or Hamas on October 7, but unlike anything else American Jews have ever experienced before. Soon their surroundings will be laced by menace.

What a truly shocking turnaround that would represent—especially when you consider that New York City is home to the largest population of Jews outside of Tel Aviv. To think of New York City is to instantly conjure Jews. For Jesse Jackson, the Big Apple was, derogatorily, “Hymie Town”; for Woody Allen, New York was wholly dependent on its Jewish essence—the Jazz Age synonymous with George Gershwin; the culinary imports like bagels and kosher franks; the laugh track of a nation that would be all rimshots without Jewish comedians.

How could cosmopolitan Jews be made to feel unwelcome in a cosmos largely of their own making?

Just wait and see. Life for Jewish New Yorkers is going to change drastically—especially if one cares about Israel and rejects the premise that social justice warriors are allowed to make war against their Jewish neighbors.

As mayor, Mamdani has no foreign policy power, but he surely campaigned as if he did. Nowadays, progressive gravitas and hatred for the Jewish state are one and the same. The man responsible for fixing potholes and plowing snow somehow convinced voters that “Globalizing the Intifada!” was a local matter, too.

He may have invoked words like “affordability,” “childcare,” and “free buses,” but what truly galvanized his campaign and made him such a political anomaly was his unabashed hatred of a Jewish state so far removed from the city he hoped to lead.

Some of his constituency will decamp to places where the wearing of religious attire is safe, the condemning of Islamic terror is not Islamophobic, and where showing support for Israel is a moral virtue, not a vice.

Florida has always served as an outpost for Jewish New Yorkers. But American Jews might come to learn the hard lessons of their transcontinental counterparts. For nearly 20 years, European governments, terrified by unassimilated and easily ignitable Muslims, have decided that Jewish citizens are not worth protecting.

“Let the Muslims have their fun and maybe they’ll leave the rest of us alone.”

Waves of immigration hellbent on converting European Christianity into an Islamic caliphate have rendered Western Europe unrecognizable—and for Jews, unlivable. Europe’s surrender has led to an exodus of Jews to Israel — people who never imagined trading the culture and cobblestones of Europe for the Iron Dome and David’s Sling of the Middle East.

Waves of immigration hellbent on converting European Christianity into an Islamic caliphate have rendered Western Europe unrecognizable—and for Jews, unlivable.

Jews who refuse to abandon Europe are left with few options. Even Poland, which has imposed rigid restrictions on immigration from Muslim countries, is not especially safe for Jews.

Poland remains almost exclusively a Catholic nation. And despite its long history with Jews dating back to the Middle Ages, Poland is not an ideal sanctuary for Jews escaping the marauding Muslims of Europe.

Before the Holocaust, Poland was home to more than 3 million Jews. This Catholic nation spawned the greatest outpouring of Jewish cultural achievement and religious expression at the time, made all the more tragic given that 90 percent of Polish Jewry was wiped out by the end of World War II.

Today with so much nostalgia and commerce devoted to Poland’s rich Jewish history—a thriving synagogue in Warsaw and a robust Jewish Community Center in Krakow—there are still not much more than 10,000 Jews residing in the country and keeping the faith.

That’s not because Poland imported Islamists to make life miserable for Jews—precisely what happened in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. What is keeping Jews out is much more homegrown.

In 2018, Poland’s parliament, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, passed a law making it a crime (and establishing civil liability) to speak publicly about Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust—either as a nation, or its people.

While it’s true that Israel’s Holocaust Museum—Yad Vashem—has recognized more than 7,000 Poles who risked their lives to save Jews as “Righteous Among the Nations,” that is actually a small number given that Germany’s death camps were largely located in Poland, where most of European Jewry lived.

Despite the critical work by academics such as Jan Gross who chronicled the role Polish Catholics played in ridding themselves of their Jewish neighbors—either by assisting the Nazis or performing their own murderous acts—the Polish people regard themselves as the primary victims of the Nazis and insist that their hands are clean of Jewish blood.

A nation in such blatant and bewildering denial cannot plausibly serve as a refuge for Jews. And in case there is any doubt, just last week Grzegorz Braun, a far-right lawmaker who occupies the opposite pole of the political spectrum from New York’s Mamdani, nonetheless shares a similar disdain for local Jewry and the Jewish state.

At a recent press conference at Auschwitz, Braun declared, “Poland is for Poles. Other nations have their own countries, including the Jews. Jews want to be super-humans in Poland, entitled to a better status, and the Polish police dance to their tune.”

Braun and Tucker Carlson, I am quite certain, have each other on speed dial.

Israel’s war in Gaza has provoked attacks against Poland’s small Jewish community. But unlike with Western Europe, Canada and the United States, Israel’s enemies are neither Islamists nor progressives. In Poland, the Jewish nemesis once again arises from the radical right.

Braun, a distant presidential contender, rejected renewed efforts to address Poland’s antisemitic climate. Nearly two years ago he took a fire extinguisher to a Hanukkah menorah in parliament, and more recently promised to dismantle the International Auschwitz Council if he should ever accede to the presidency.

Meanwhile, the new U.S. ambassador to Poland, Thomas Rose, entered the fray during a recent speech in Warsaw, declaring that any talk of Polish complicity during the Holocaust was a “grotesque falsehood” and “morally scandalous”—going so far as to call it a “blood libel,” a term ordinarily associated with Jewish canards.

Yes, ambassadors are skilled in the art of diplomacy, and Rose is charged with representing American interests in a country that eschews any blame for crimes committed during the Holocaust on its soil.

But erasure and denial are moral crimes that should transcend diplomatic niceties and protocols. Three million Jewish ghosts went up in smoke or died as skeletons at places such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Maidanek. Many were betrayed by Polish Catholics who profited from their neighbors’ deaths. All ghost stories demand that the wrongly dead be remembered for how their lives came to an end.

Now is not the time to trivialize the truth as to why there are so few Jews alive today—and why some feel there are still too many.

There has been no shortage of whitewashing these days. How else to explain Mamdani and his legions of progressives pretending that Jews have never been anything other than privileged white oppressors. Now is not the time to trivialize the truth as to why there are so few Jews alive today—and why some feel there are still too many.