Copyright talkingpointsmemo
It is also profoundly silly for all these rabbis to argue that this one candidate is the person, the thing that will unleash these forces. In the New Yorker’s big profile of Mamdani it’s reported that – as he was mapping his run – he and his advisors debated how much to lean into his real views and background on Israel-Palestine. And they looked at the trajectory of the party post-10/7 and the way young people had revolted against Biden and Harris, and decided that his real views would actually be an asset in this primary. And they were right. They were right because of Israel’s catastrophic political miscalculations which led to losing a generation of young people in America, and they were right because of Joe Biden’s fecklessness in being unable to rein in the excesses of the response in Gaza, and yes, because of neural grooves toward antisemitism across society. But this is where this whole things breaks down for me, or at least where I get tripped up. The whole debate – Rabbis Cosgrove, Hirsch, the letter – it’s all being framed as if Mamdani’s election will be the domino that sets off all these forces. But it’s the opposite. He is riding the wave that has already begun. The idea that the election of this guy is the thing that will unleash these forces to me indicates that these rabbis don’t quite understand what is actually going on, or how young people form their opinions, or maybe how people outside of their very cloistered Hasbara bubble form their opinions. That’s not to say that Mamdani won’t give a face and name and shape to some of this stuff. He will! But it’s already here. And honestly, he seems so much more open to engagement and evolution and existing in a messy coalition than some of the other ideologues on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. And secondly: The other deeply disturbing thing the letters and “sermons” miss is that it is just entirely unrealistic, and in my view unreasonable, to expect the world’s position on Israel to remain unchanged after two years of horrific war crimes in Gaza – the utter annihilation of an entire civilization, of whole bloodlines, of children, etc. I am deeply skeptical of rabbis who get up on the bima and chalk that up to “Israel is flawed as any country/of course we don’t like Bibi” and then lambaste anyone who actually uses strong language to call out these absolute desecration of God’s name. If you can’t re-examine your relationship with Israel, and even re-tool it, after these two years, why should I listen to your moralizing about antisemitism? Instead of continuing this long path of reflexive fear responses – where we allow ourselves to be totally paralyzed into a state of rage and fight response at any inkling of change on the Israel question – I think we need a real spiritual renewal as a Jewish people. How did we get here? For what do we bear communal responsibility? How can we break the cycle of these toxic dynamics? How can we create a political horizon to prevent this all from happening again (god forbid) in five or ten years? We should try to live in honest, uncomfortable complexity even when it’s easier to simplify all politics to “he’s an antisemite.” So yes, what the fuck are we talking about? Please. We owe ourselves as a people more than that.
