Mamdani and the collapse of ‘liberal Zionism’
Members of his administration can’t protect New York Jewry while
working for a mayor who opposes Israel’s existence and defends
antisemites.
JNS
Feb 9, 2026
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch is the one holdover from the former Eric Adams administration who seems to be
motivated by a real desire to steer the city’s government in a way that will help protect Jews.
When former New York City Mayor Eric Adams
created an Office to Combat Antisemitism last May, it was widely
interpreted as a political gesture intended to boost his failing
independent run for re-election in November. Adams had always been
broadly supportive of Israel and the wider Jewish community. But his
move was too little and too late—both to do much about the surge of
antisemitism that followed the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks
on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and to save his mayoral campaign.
Adams dropped out of the race in
September, six weeks before Zohran Mamdani was elected to succeed him.
Mamdani, an avowed opponent of the existence of the State of Israel and a
supporter of the pro-Hamas mobs who were the shock troops of the wave
of Jew-hatred that swept across the country, hasn’t abolished Adams’s
pet project. Similar to his predecessor, the motive for this is
political. While Adams used it to signal his somewhat ineffectual
support for the Jewish people, Mamdani seeks to employ it to provide
cover for the fact that he is still doubling down on his anti-Zionism
and efforts to link that noxious cause to other items on his agenda,
such as opposing the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on
illegal immigration.
To do this, he has appointed Phylisa Wisdom, a veteran left-wing activist, to lead it.
Serving an antisemite
Phylisa Wisdom, the mayor's Jewish antisemitism czar, has demonstrated in the course of her career, in practice being an
avowed “liberal Zionist” means acting as an ally of those working to
undermine and even destroy the Jewish state.
Wisdom’s main qualifications seem to
consist of a worldview that is sympathetic to Mamdani’s political
program—with one exception. According to The New York Times,
she is a “liberal Zionist,” which the paper seems to define as someone
who has “criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza” while still believing in
“Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.”
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica
Tisch is the one holdover from the former administration who seems to be
motivated by a real desire to hold the line against Jew-hatred in law
enforcement, as well as to possibly further her personal future
political ambitions. But Wisdom’s post isn’t nearly as important as the
one that controls the police. Like the situation last year, it’s far
from clear what, if anything, it can do about the epidemic of
antisemitism in New York, highlighted by the fact that hate crimes against Jews rose a staggering 182% in Mamdani’s first month in office.
This is hardly surprising. Avowals
notwithstanding, Mamdani’s ardent anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from
antisemitism since he denies Jews rights that neither he nor anyone
else would think of denying to any other people.
What Phylisa Wisdom stands for
Wisdom’s significance, therefore, comes
not from how much she can contribute to the effort to reverse that
trend, but how it symbolizes what has happened to the idea of “liberal
Zionism” in the 21st century. If acting and speaking as she has done is
what it means to be a liberal Zionist today, then a real disconnect
exists. It’s not merely time to realize that the phrase has lost its
original meaning; instead, we must understand that those who have
appropriated that label are neither Zionist nor authentically liberal.
In theory, those who identify as political
liberals have an important role to play in rallying support for Israel
and Zionism within the Jewish community and the non-Jewish world.
Adherence to liberalism—whether in the form of the classical school of
political thought that prized individual liberty above all, or even just
as a label that most members of the Democratic Party applied to
themselves—can be entirely compatible with Zionism. Indeed, for most of
the history of the modern Zionist movement, the natural affinity between
liberal economic and political ideas and the effort to facilitate the
self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland was
patently obvious.
But as Wisdom has demonstrated in the
course of her career, in practice being an avowed “liberal Zionist”
means acting as an ally of those working to undermine and even destroy
the Jewish state, whose existence she says she supports. At the same
time, she is also aiding a cause that is fundamentally illiberal.
Let’s start by noting that claiming to be a
supporter of Israel and an opponent of antisemitism while serving in a
Mamdani administration represents a contradiction in terms. There may be
some who say that it is important for the Jewish community to have a
voice among the mayor’s advisers. But this is no ordinary mayor of New
York. The 34-year-old chief executive of Gotham is someone whose entire
brief political career has revolved around his obsessive opposition to
Israel’s existence and Jewish rights.
Even if we assume that someone like Tisch
is sincere in her desire to steer the city’s government in a way that
will help protect Jews, it’s already apparent that she’s deceiving
herself. Whatever checks she or someone in Wisdom’s office can try to
put on the mayor’s ideological fixation about Israel and Jewish life
will be outweighed by the way the mayor’s rhetoric and actions are
legitimizing and mainstreaming Jew-hatred.
Though Mamdani may disingenuously pledge his desire to protect Jews, even his half-hearted statements
about protecting synagogues from pro-Hamas mobs send the message that
he is on the side of the attackers. Those who think they can influence
him or somehow lessen the harm he will cause by serving him are
deceiving themselves. To collaborate with Mamdani in any way is to
commit to compromising one’s own morality far more than it could ever
influence him.
Supporting blood libels
Still, it is just as important to look at
Wisdom’s stands and ponder whether they are in any way compatible with a
traditional definition of liberal Zionism.
A glance through Wisdom’s social-media posts,
a litany of her political stands or those of the New York Jewish Agenda
(NYJA) group that she has led since July 2023, reveals someone who is
most interested in bashing Israel, in addition to providing aid and
comfort to those who seek to take it down. Indeed, the main point of
that group is to provide a platform for the “as a Jew” version of modern
Jewish life. That is an all-too-common trend. It is a means to comment
about Israel by using one’s Jewish identity to legitimize arguments
seeking to treat virtually any effort to defend it as illegitimate or a
crime.
The position of NYJA is indistinguishable
from that of J Street, which started out claiming to be both “pro-Israel
and pro-peace.” In practice, the group became a mouthpiece for those
who were determined to impose suicidal concessions to the Palestinians
that had been repeatedly rejected by the Israeli people. In the wake of
Oct. 7, J Street and NYJA ultimately found themselves mainly acting to
support the efforts of those who sought to prevent Israel from attacking
Hamas and Iran, and thus to ensure the victory of the terrorists.
Worse than that, they were guilty of
lending credibility to the blood libels about Israeli conduct that have
been fueling antisemitism. In particular, Wisdom and NYJA repeatedly
weighed in to support
the false claims that Israel was deliberately causing starvation in
Gaza, and in doing so, claimed that the Jewish state was morally
equivalent to Hamas. That she did so while claiming to uphold Jewish
values is no defense for this immoral and destructive stance.
In this context, her assertion that she
supports Israel’s “right to exist” (something that only among all the
nations in the world is considered controversial when applied to the
Jewish state) is merely a way to justify opposing anything done to
defend it from those who are waging a genocidal war to destroy it.
Equally helpful to understanding just how
little her positions have to do with liberalism or Zionism is her
consistent opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to combat
bigotry against students on college campuses. Wisdom opposed the federal
government’s attempts to hold institutions like Columbia University on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side accountable for their toleration and
encouragement of Jew-hatred, which clearly violates the 1964 U.S. Civil
Rights Act. Beyond that, she took up the cause to defend Mahmoud Khalil,
a foreign student who was one of the chief organizers of the pro-Hamas
demonstrations that targeted Jews at the Ivy League school for
intimidation and violence, when the administration sought to deport him
for violating the terms of his visa.
Like Mamdani, Khalil isn’t merely
“pro-Palestinian.” He is an active supporter of the campaign to destroy
Israel and has a long record of working for anti-Israel groups like the
U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. But to Wisdom, his antisemitic
record and actions were not as important as the imperative to oppose
Trump and back his anti-Israeli opponents.
While Wisdom and others on the left claim
that this position is a defense of individuals against a repressive
state authority, it puts them in the position of bolstering illiberal
figures like Khalil, who support the most reactionary and repressive
Islamist groups. In this manner, too many contemporary liberals have
allowed themselves to be convinced to support racialist theories that
undermine the defense of Western civilization and help bolster the war
against Jews that Islamists seek to spread.
Illiberal Islamist imagery
Mamdani’s use of Islamist imagery
in his efforts to oppose Trump’s willingness to enforce existing
immigration laws ought to trouble genuine liberals. The mayor claimed
that the Islamic principles and history he invoked were also a reason to
support open borders policies in the contemporary United States. But
they actually helped form the prelude for Muslim campaigns to persecute
Jews during that religion’s conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and the
Middle East.
A true liberal Zionist might disagree with
President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on
many issues. Yet they would support Israel’s war on Hamas and oppose
the importation of Islamist radicalism into the United States.
There are still many such liberal
Zionists. Still, they have allowed leftists like Wisdom to hijack that
term and marginalize supporters of Israel on the political left. This is
a liberalism that not only won’t support Israel, but is determined to
disarm those who seek to defend America against toxic Marxist ideas that
single out Jews as “white” oppressors. The rise of Mamdani to political
power is a function of the way these leftist ideologues have turned the
Democratic Party into a haven for anti-Zionists and those who are
enabling the surge of antisemitism.
That such a person has been put into a
position where their job is to defend Jews against hatred isn’t merely
ironic. It’s a logical conclusion to a process by which liberalism has
been subverted by those who oppose its basic precepts that are the
foundation of Jewish security. We should treat Wisdom’s elevation to
this role as not so much inappropriate but as a parody of efforts to
combat antisemitism.
More than that, it should be a wake-up
call to those liberal supporters of Israel to begin to fight in earnest
against the forces that have swept to control of the Democratic Party.
Conservatives are also fighting to fend
off antisemites on the right, but there is no question that such figures
remain a minority, and that, at present, it is only the Trump
administration and its supporters who are actively fighting antisemitism
in the United States. If Jewish liberals aren’t prepared to resist
Mamdani and his Jewish collaborators, like Wisdom, then they should stop
calling themselves liberal Zionists and concede that the idea has
become obsolete.
