Opinion by Ezra Klein on July 20, 2025.

It’s a tense time in the Jewish family group chats. The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down. That consensus, roughly, was this: What is good for Israel is good for the Jews. Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. And there will, someday soon, be a two-state solution that reconciles Zionism and liberalism.

Every component of that consensus has cracked.

Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor has forced, among many Jews, a reckoning with how far they have drifted from one another. Mamdani does not use the slogan “globalize the intifada,” but he does not condemn those who do. He has said that if he were mayor, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, would face arrest on war crimes charges if he set foot in New York City. Israel has a right to exist, he says, but “as a state with equal rights.”

Many older Jews I know are shocked and scared by Mamdani’s victory. Israel, to them, is the world’s only reliable refuge for the Jewish people. They see opposition to Israel as a cloak for antisemitism. They believe that if the United States abandons Israel then Israel will, sooner or later, cease to exist. To them, Mamdani is a harbinger. If he can win in New York City — a city with more Jews than any save Tel Aviv, Israel — then nowhere is safe.

Many younger Jews I know voted for Mamdani. They are not afraid of him. What they fear is a future in which Israel is an apartheid state ruling over ruins in the Gaza Strip and Bantustans in the West Bank. They fear what that means for anti-Jewish violence all over the world. They fear what that will do — what it has already done — to the meaning of Jewishness. Their commitment to the basic ideals of liberalism is stronger than their commitment to what Israel has become.

To call Mamdani an anti-Zionist is accurate, but the power of his position is that it is thoroughly, even banally, liberal. “I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,” he said. There are ethnonationalists who might object to that sentiment. But the flourishing of American Jews is built atop that foundation.

“ It really points to what I think is the fundamental contradiction of American liberal Zionism,” Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, a leftist journal of Jewish thought, told me. “American Jews tend to think that our success in the United States is a product of the fact that the country does not define belonging according to ethnicity or religion. And Israel is, of course, based on the idea of a state representing a particular ethnic religious group.”

For Jews of the diaspora, multiethnic democracy — in which the rights and security of political minorities are protected — is the bedrock on which our safety is built. For Jews of Israel, a Jewish majority is the bedrock upon which their state is built. “Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state,” David Ben-Gurion said in 1947. For decades, the two-state solution was the construct that allowed these values to coexist, if only at some point in the future. That vision now lies buried beneath the settlements of the West Bank, the rubble of Gaza and the expansionist ambitions of Israel’s right-wing government.

Many American Jews blame Netanyahu for this. There is a fantasy that when he leaves, or is defeated, Israel will snap back to the politics of its past. But Netanyahu survives because, on this as on much else, he represents the Israeli mainstream. Polls show a majority of Israeli Jews are open to the expulsion of Palestinians and only a shrinking minority are still willing to entertain a Palestinian state. That there is widespread anger at Netanyahu in Israel is true. That those angry at Netanyahu want his successor to seek a Palestinian state, or even Palestinian rights, is false.

Virtually all Jews believe in the adage that antisemitism is a light sleeper. It is hard not to hear it awakening. This month, Elon Musk’s xAI released an “improved” Grok model that sprayed the internet with veneration of Adolf Hitler. One user asked Grok if it could worship a god, and if so, which it would choose. “It would probably be the godlike individual of our time, the Man against time, the greatest European of all times, both Sun and Lightning, his Majesty Adolf Hitler,” the AI replied.

The Grok mess is unnerving. The violence in the real world is chilling. A man is accused of setting fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home. Two young employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington were murdered as they left an American Jewish Committee event. A man used a makeshift flamethrower to attack a crowd rallying for the Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, killing a woman in her 80s. In all of these cases, officials said that the attackers described their motive as a defense of Palestinians. “Attacks against the Jewish community have been growing for years, experts on hate crimes say, but increasingly, perpetrators are citing Israel’s war in Gaza, blurring the line between opposing the Israeli government and opposing Jewish people,” The Washington Post reported.

Acres of evidence attest to a reality all Jews know: Anger at Israel becomes anger at Jews everywhere. This is delicate territory — both emotionally and factually. “Antisemitism is a prejudice,” Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and President Joe Biden’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism abroad, told me. “A prejudice can’t be caused by something. It’s inherently irrational.” But anger at Israel, Lipstadt continued, can “ give the antisemite a good excuse for ramping up their antisemitism,” or it can “give the person who’s been raised in Western culture where antisemitism is in the atmosphere something to fall back on.”

Others see the link as more direct and causal. “ I think absolutely the weekly reports of Israeli soldiers shooting on Palestinians who are in long lines to get food is a calamity for Jews,” May said. “It’s a spiritual crisis. It’s a moral and political crisis and I do think it has tangible effects on Jewish security.”

I’ve watched the experience of rising antisemitism polarize young Jews into two camps. Some have moved closer to Israel, convinced that their elders were right and their standing in the West was more tenuous than they had believed. Some have moved into a deeper alienation, horrified at what is being done in their name and angry at the way their safety has felt compromised by the actions and politics of a state in which they do not live.

“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,” Ehud Olmert, Israel’s former prime minister, wrote in Haaretz. “We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

What many young Jews see is what Olmert sees and they want no part of it. Are they to defend war crimes? Are they to defend, or even accept, the use of mass starvation as a tool of war? Are they to believe in equality everywhere but in the state that is meant to be their spiritual home? There are many who bristled at the term “genocide” a year ago but have come to accept it now.

What other Jews see is a world that cares little for Jewish life and has always sought Israel’s destruction. “We’re talking about a country that exists,” Lipstadt said. “So when you say, ‘I’m an anti-Zionist,’ what is Zionism? It’s the right of Jews to have a national homeland. And if you’re saying, ‘I don’t believe in that,’ then on a very practical level, what happens to the six-plus million Jews who live in that country?”

After our conversation, Lipstadt emailed me to underscore a point. “Here’s what I would say to those young people or whomever who question the right of Israel to exist. They may not be — they probably are not — antisemitic in intent, but placing the lives of half of the world Jewish population in danger is absolutely antisemitic in impact.”

I found myself mulling Lipstadt’s point days later. Her argument is an almost precise echo of Ibram X. Kendi’s definition of antiracism: “A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.” Intent, in this telling, is irrelevant. What matters are consequences.

But that can tip you into disorienting conclusions: If you believe that Netanyahu has put Israel on a path to becoming an international pariah, is he then an antisemite in impact, even if not in intent? If you believe it would be better if Israel faced real pressure to create a viable Palestinian state, then is the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement in fact a friend to the Jews? To measure antisemitism by the consequence of policies and actions is to open debates that many would prefer to keep closed.

Debates about Israel often circle the same, strangely posed question: Does Israel have the right to exist? The question is engineered to trap the conversation in the past rather than capture the urgency of the present. Israel does exist. It is a rich, nuclear-armed power with the strongest military in the region, by far. It decapitated Hezbollah and humiliated Iran. Hamas could perpetrate the murders of Oct. 7 only because Israel had become so certain of its strength that it allowed its attention to basic questions of security to lapse. But Hamas did not then, and certainly does not now, threaten Israel’s existence.

Israel has more than the right to exist. It has the strength to exist. The Jews who live there have more than the right to self-determination. They have self-determination. The same cannot be said for Palestinians. About 2 million Palestinians live inside Israel. They are, by any measure, second-class citizens. In 2018, three Palestinian members of Israel’s Knesset proposed a law to affirm “the principle of equal citizenship for every citizen” and outlaw “discrimination on grounds of nationality, race, religion, gender, language, color, political outlook, ethnic origin or social status.”

Yuli Edelstein, then the speaker of the Israeli Knesset, would not permit it even to be debated. “This is a preposterous bill that any intelligent individual can see must be blocked immediately,” Edelstein said. “A bill that aims to gnaw at the foundations of the state must not be allowed in the Knesset.”

It is revealing of the morally weakened position Israel now inhabits that it cannot survive the principle of political equality.

Outside of Israel, domination by the ethnic majority is what Jews have been taught to fear most. “I’ve joked more than once that I was going to open a family therapy practice for liberal Zionist parents whose kids took the social justice values seriously and emerged as anti-Zionists,” Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, told me. Lander is the highest-ranking Jew in the city government. He also cross-endorsed Mamdani.

Mamdani, Lander said, “doesn’t have an antisemitic bone in his body.” At the same time, Lander finds himself bristling over some of the rhetoric Mamdani defends. “ I don’t like the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’” Lander said. “I’m sure some people mean to be saying, ‘fight for the rights of Palestinians all around the world.’ But in the wake of Boulder and D.C., what I hear is ‘open season on Jews.’” But disagreement is the price of multiethnic democracy. (And Mamdani, it should be noted, is continuing to back away from that phrase, now saying he would “discourage” its use.)

Antisemitism is serving as a beard for an assault on the ideals and institutions that have made America into a place where Jews can flourish. If Israel becomes a right-wing ethnostate, and if opposition to that state is antisemitic, then Jews will become mascots for a politics that would have made the Jewish diaspora unthinkable.

For decades, American Judaism, built on the liberalism of the diaspora, has been interwoven with Zionism. What happens when the ideals of the one become incompatible with the reality of the other?

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
c. 2025 The New York Times Company