The Wrong Lesson from Madison Square Garden

The clip of Brad Lander went viral. The Democratic nominee for Congress in New York’s 10th District was shouted down and told to leave a protest on the sidewalk outside Madison Square Garden. As reported by the Jerusalem Post, protesters called him a paid Zionist and told him they didn’t need his help. The irony was hard to miss: Lander is Jewish, but has been a vocal critic of Israel. He had come to denounce the rally inside the Garden as “fascist and hateful” and compared it to the pro-Nazi rally held there in 1939. 

Then the label landed on him. The man who had come to condemn an ideology was reduced, by some of the protesters, to one of their own: “Zionist.” For some in the crowd, that single word was enough to make him, in their eyes, the wrong kind of person to be standing there. Whatever else he believed or had come to say no longer mattered. That is how labels work: they turn people into categories, and categories into targets.

Inside the Garden, the scene was a good deal less menacing than the one outside. About 5,000 people, many of them Hindu Americans, watched a cappella singers, dancers, and speakers from multiple faiths. I was among them, with a friend who is Hindu. I am Jewish. 

The keynote speaker was Mohan Bhagwat, head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S. Reasonable people can disagree sharply about the R.S.S.’s record in India, and those arguments are worth having. But there is a difference between debating an organization’s conduct or history abroad and passing judgment on the people who gather to hear its leader.

The event was hosted by the American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue, or AHEAD Forum, in partnership with more than 250 Hindu American organizations from across the United States. This is also the community whose temples keep getting vandalized. The F.B.I.’s most recent hate crime report recorded 28 anti-Hindu incidents in 2025, a 12% increase over the prior year. In September 2024, the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir in Melville, New York, was spray-painted with threatening messages overnight; Suffolk County police opened a hate crime investigation. In March 2025, the BAPS temple in Chino Hills, California, was vandalized, causing more than $15,000 in damage. Hindu Americans are asking whether it is safe to go to a temple. The response from some running for office has been to associate them with Nazis.

Since the August event, more than 90 politicians have signed a pledge to refuse donations from anyone “affiliated” with the R.S.S. The fact that this pledge is framed around association rather than a showing of unlawful conduct by the donor matters. In NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958), the Supreme Court recognized that compelled disclosure of organizational membership can burden freedom of association when disclosure exposes members to reprisals. Whatever one thinks of the RSS, a policy that turns an undefined association into a basis for excluding a citizen’s political contribution deserves careful scrutiny. When 90 U.S. politicians declare a citizen’s donation tainted, potentially by his weekend yoga class, that is not accountability. It is the machinery of exclusion, aimed at a religious and ethnic minority.

As a Jew, I know how this works because I have watched it happen to my own community. For most American Jews, “Zionist” means only that Israel should exist; nevertheless, it has become a slur that licenses almost anything. I am automatically associated with, and blamed for, the death and suffering of Palestinians — suffering that is real, and that I do not dismiss. But “genocide” is also a legal term with a specific meaning, and its use in describing Israel’s conduct remains the subject of intense legal and political dispute. A coalition of more than 70 organizations has documented how the accusation was generated and amplified beginning the day after October 7, before Israel’s ground operation had even started. The word has nonetheless been repeated so confidently, and so often, that many Americans now treat it as settled truth.

The consequences are not abstract. The Anti-Defamation League counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025, five times the number a decade earlier. In May 2025, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington as they left an event — they were about to be engaged. A month later, Karen Diamond, 82, died of burns after a man threw Molotov cocktails into a Boulder, Colorado rally for Israeli hostages. In both cases, the perpetrators appear to have acted on ideological hostility rather than random violence. That is where the politics of collective blame can lead: when a label becomes a license to see an entire community as guilty, violence can begin to look like justice.

The pattern does not care whether the target wears a kippah or a bindi. Find the most extreme association you can attach to a community. Repeat it until it hardens into fact. Then treat every member as that fact. If anyone objects, treat the objection as proof of complicity. At no point in this process does anyone ask the grandmother in Row 200 at MSG, watching the dancers, what she thinks. She is no longer a grandmother. She is a label.

In an instant, Mr. Lander went from being a fellow protester to being treated by some in the crowd as morally disqualified because of one word attached to him: “Zionist.” He did not seem to notice. Hindu Americans and Jews are living in an America where neither is offered nuance, and neither is offered the dignity of being one person rather than a category.

The politicians who signed those pledges should remember that the people they are judging are not abstractions in a debate about India. They are Hindu Americans. They live here, vote here, work here, raise their children here, and build their communities here. Before deciding what they represent, politicians should go to an HSS meeting, join a seva project, visit a Hindu temple, sit with a family over dinner, and listen to what Hindu Americans actually believe and care about. They may still conclude that the R.S.S. deserves condemnation. They may still oppose its politics, its leaders, or its influence. But they should know whom they are condemning. The people inside Madison Square Garden are not an ideology. They are Americans.

Karen Gal-Or is a former federal prosecutor and co-founder of Om and Shalom, a Pittsburgh-based Hindu-Jewish initiative that brings the two communities together to combat hate, strengthen civic ties, and advocate around shared values.