What The Hell America!

So sayeth Andrew Cuomo: “It’s very simple: anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

On Tuesday, the former New York governor and current New York City mayoral candidate gave a speech at a Manhattan orthodox synagogue arguing that antisemitism is a rising threat in New York City and promising that fighting it would be a centerpiece of his mayoralty. I too am gravely concerned about antisemitism, in this country and around the world. But according to reporting, the speech began with this false premise before metastasizing into a series of slanders against the most prominent mayoral candidates running to his left.

Cuomo’s opening gambit is neither simple nor true. Anti-Zionism is a tradition as old as Zionism.

The Jewish Labor Bund, an anti-Zionist socialist party born in the stretch of Eastern Europe known among Jews as “Yiddishland,” was founded the same year as Zionism and opposed any project of colonization, as it was called even then. There is also a long tradition of religious Jewish anti-Zionism, which happens to have a stronghold in parts of Brooklyn.

Contra Cuomo’s simplistic formulation, there is a long, rich, and diverse legacy of Jewish anti-Zionism, as well as non-Jewish anti-Zionism that has nothing to do with antisemitism.

Yes, there are anti-Zionists who are antisemites. They are no friends to Jews or to the Left. There are also socialists who are sexists, Irish republicans who are anti-Protestant bigots, supporters of a free Tibet who are Christian supremacists, and on and on and on. People are complicated, and some of them are assholes. But their mere existence doesn’t discredit anti-Zionism, socialism, Irish republicanism or Tibetan liberation as political projects or intellectual traditions.

Starting from this false premise, Cuomo went on to propose new rules against mask wearing (against the objections of groups like Jews for Mask Rights) and to punish those who boycott Israeli firms or Israeli-funded institutions.

“Boycotting the boycotters,” in his terminology, is an old hobbyhorse for Cuomo. The first time I can remember protesting in front of the governor’s office was with Jewish Voice for Peace in 2016, when then governor Cuomo pushed through a state policy barring people who endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement from doing business with the state. The ACLU called it “an affront to free expression,” but it remains state policy to this day.

From this already low point in his speech, Cuomo sunk deeper, maligning his mayoral competitors as antisemites with absurd characterizations that ring false in terms of both logic and evidence.

His greatest opprobrium came for Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)–endorsed mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, an assemblymember from Queens who has long advocated for Palestinian liberation and is a staple at events organized by leftist Jewish organizations like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow.

Two years ago, Mamdani sponsored the “Not On Our Dime” bill, which would strip away the nonprofit status from New York groups that fund illegal West Bank settlements. Cuomo mischaracterized the bill as defunding any nonprofit “that helped Israel,” and therefore as a threat to a great many Jewish institutions. Failing to distinguish between the state of Israel and its settlements is something Zionists attack anti-Zionists for doing all the time, but no matter. For Cuomo, any practice that would discipline Israel for its illegal and immoral acts is tantamount to antisemitism, no matter how many Jewish groups supported the bill.

Next, Cuomo moved on to another favorite punching bag to his left, New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander. Lander is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in New York City. He was a founding member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and a contributor to the seminal volume of critical Jewish thought on Israel, Wrestling With Zion. Both he and Mamdani were recently coendorsed for mayor by The Jewish Vote, the electoral arm of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.

But to Cuomo, Lander is just another Jewish antisemite. In his speech, Cuomo denounced Lander for divesting New York City funds from Israel bonds — which wouldn’t be antisemitic if it were true, but also, inconveniently for the former governor, is simply false. New York City pensions, Lander was quick to point out, are not invested in any other nation’s bonds.

Most bizarrely, Cuomo maligned the moderate speaker of the City Council, Queens representative and mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams (no relation to New York City mayor Eric Adams). Cuomo falsely claimed the Council speaker as one of DSA’s “disciples.” But the real proof that she is an antisemite is that she has not visited Israel during her time as Council speaker. Cuomo characterized this as a one-woman “boycott,” even though Adams has never remotely made such a claim herself. The one time she was offered a spot on a trip she declined because it fell in the middle of the city’s annual budget negotiations.

After the speech, all three candidates released statements calling out Cuomo for his nonsense. Speaker Adams’s campaign called it “division and name-calling.” Lander correctly noted that “everything [Cuomo] does and says is driven by nasty, personal psychodrama and fueled by his personal desire for power,” and told the press that he doesn’t need Andrew Cuomo to tell him how to be Jewish. Mamdani’s campaign flatly asserted that “Andrew Cuomo does not care about antisemitism.”

All of those points are true. He is sowing division. He is deranged. And he doesn’t really care about antisemitism. But it’s worse than all that.

Andrew Cuomo is running a campaign to become New York City mayor promising only the vaguest of policy proposals but insinuating that he will enrich the already rich and reward his powerful friends and backers. And he is claiming as that his mandate for all that meshugaas is to protect the Jews.

I don’t know what Andrew thinks about “the Jews” in his heart of hearts, although he did once allegedly deride our religious practice of constructing temporary dwellings on the holiday of Sukkot as “those people and their fucking tree houses.” Still, I’m sure some of his best friends are Jewish.

What I do know, however, is that Cuomo is actively, repeatedly, and maliciously cloaking his reactionary agenda in the guise of our alleged defense, often tearing down Jewish critics like Lander in the process. Rather than protecting us, Cuomo’s rhetoric only instructs those who are rightfully mad about his misdeeds to fault “the Jews,” in whose name he claims to act.

In my view, it is more antisemitic to thusly imperil us than to simply say or think mean things about us. This is antisemitism masquerading as a muscular defense of Jews.

Cuomo is far from alone in endangering Jews in the name of our safety. Eric Adams, Donald Trump, Bibi Netanyahu — all are using Jewish safety as a pretext for violence and plunder.

When terrible men do terrible things in the guise of Jewish defense, those who are harmed and those who are horrified may well turn against the people on whose behalf these actions were pitched — whether or not those people ever endorsed the actors or the actions. Cuomo and all of these men are making us less safe in the name of our safety, and they are destroying the lives of our neighbors in the guise of defending our lives. There could be nothing less Jewish than deporting immigrants, creating refugees, or seeking the destruction of an entire people. Those doing so are the most dangerous antisemites of all.