Inaugurations are generally hopeful days for democracies. Even the most bitter of electoral battles can—with sufficient goodwill and patriotism—transition to the normal business of political give-and-take. But when a democratic election gives power to a person and a faction determined to overthrow the basic foundations of a free society, platitudes about new beginnings and wishing the winners all the best are not a sufficient response to the situation.

That is the dilemma presented by the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City.

The 34-year-old, who was sworn in as the 112th person to hold that office on New Year’s Day, may have presented his new administration as one that will protect all the people of the largest city in America. Yet he wasted no time in making clear that he was discarding protections against one of the significant demographic groups that make up Gotham’s “mosaic”: the Jews.

Undermining Jewish rights

In one of his first acts as mayor, Mamdani rescinded executive orders issued by his predecessor, Eric Adams, designed to protect Jews from the surge of hatred that has been raging across the globe, as well as in New York in the two years since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

That is hardly a surprise, since for all of his claims to oppose hatred of Jews, Mamdani has been actively cheering on the mobs chanting “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada” on college campuses and in city streets that targeted Jews for intimidation and violence.

Among them were orders that adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism. That definition cites the very same demonizing of Jews and Israel that Mamdani and his anti-Zionist allies engage in by seeking the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet, and thereby stripping Jews of rights denied to no other people. The orders also prohibited city entities and personnel from engaging in BDS—boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel—which, far from being merely political speech, are themselves acts of illegal discrimination. Another sought to prevent houses of worship from being besieged by demonstrators—something that already happened at the end of November at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, when an anti-Zionist mob sought to make Jews afraid to attend pro-Israel events.

It is these actions—and not the flowery populist language of hope and solidarity with working people that Mamdani employed in his inaugural speech—that set the tone for the new administration. His mayoralty is much like the entire “progressive” project, which has made itself felt throughout American society in recent years via the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), or the toxic teachings of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that have distorted the education system. In this way, Mamdani’s ideas—and the possibility that they will be implemented—threaten more than just the Jews. It lends power to the woke progressives who belong to the bizarre red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists that he embodies.

They threaten all Americans, both in New York and elsewhere. It reflects the ideologies of fellow socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who are spearheading the effort to spread the same twisted ideas on the national stage and who were on hand to celebrate Mamdani’s swearing-in

No one should be under any illusions about what Mamdani’s pledge to replace “rugged individualism” with “the warmth of collectivism” will mean.

Individualism v. collectivism

His proud avowal of socialism—albeit with the word prefix “democratic” in front of it, which renders it an oxymoron—is a potent threat not to entrenched interests and villainous billionaires, as he claims. That swipe at individualism seeks to undermine the essence of Western ideas about political and economic rights, as well as justice itself. Mamdani seeks to use the power of City Hall to chip away at those rights in the name of the collective good. But America is a nation that was founded on the notion that those rights rest in the individual citizen as their inherent right and not as a gift from a government.

It is a testimony to the lack of historical knowledge, even the history of just the last 50 years, among younger Americans that socialism is coming back into fashion. As with their predecessors a century ago, many New Yorkers voted for a socialist in the belief that what he stands for is an idealistic faith that will uplift the downtrodden and prevent the rich from exploiting them. His plans for free bus fares, lower rent and cheaper groceries sound good to them, as such promises always do.

The sense that New York is no longer affordable for anyone but the very rich is rooted in reality. Many in the governing class, who belong to both political parties, discarded the interests of working people in favor of globalist economics. That resulted in the offshoring of manufacturing jobs and flooded the country with illegal immigrants, which raised the price of housing and lessened wages for blue-collar Americans while also overwhelming the social-service capabilities of communities, including in New York.

At the same time, some members of educated classes—many of whom went into debt getting worthless college degrees, including those in gender and racial studies, and other non-traditional fields—have been indoctrinated in leftist ideologies and are also frustrated that they are not as well off as those engaged in more productive activities.

A system that doesn’t work

But their woes, as well as those of the working class, are not the result of too little government intervention in the economy, let alone socialism. It reflects too much of it, as every study of state-mandated price controls in housing, food distribution and other sectors always shows. Contrary to the advocacy of slick demagogues like Mamdani and AOC, the creation of wealth and its distribution among a broad swath of citizens is the product of that same individualism that Marxists seek to tear down.

Socialism may sound like a good idea to those who are unaware of the unspeakable suffering it has visited upon every country that fully tried it. Rather than increasing freedom, it always reduces it, since the system is based on the idea that intellectuals and activists know best, and are entitled to direct the way everyone lives and works—and to use the power of government to enforce their misguided plans.

It’s true that many Jews have been seduced by socialism in the last century. Some in Eastern Europe believed that it was the solution to antisemitism. But the Bundists who thought socialism would protect an autonomous Jewish community were deluded, as the Holocaust and 70 years of Soviet tyranny proved. The Jewish experiments in socialism during the process of building the State of Israel should not lead anyone to think of that as an idea that can work. The Labor Zionists who built collective farms and created industries where none existed before were essential to the creation of the Jewish state. But those ideas were checks on its development as a democracy, and many of the institutions they created had eventually had to be discarded or bypassed to facilitate the establishment of Israel’s current prosperous economy.

In practice, socialism is more akin to a religious faith than a set of public-policy proposals. In this way, the facts about its bankruptcy as economic theory and how it leads to tyranny in one form or another allow its adherents to distort, dismiss or simply ignore the examples of how it always fails.

As is usually the case, attacks on the rights of many usually begin with those that impact the few. That is why Mamdani’s obsessive support of the war on Israel and the Jews—a belief that has been the driving force of his entire career—isn’t merely one small facet of his agenda, but rests at its core.

He is defended by a minority of Jews. Still, even in deep-blue New York, where many people, Jews and non-Jews alike, will vote for anyone with the label of Democrat, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population didn’t support him and are appalled by his embrace of the cause of Israel’s destruction.

From ideas to violence

The new mayor’s orders won’t transform New York City in 2025 into Berlin in 1933 or 1938. Yet we needn’t catastrophize the situation with inappropriate analogies or hyperbole to understand that when you say that it’s OK to discriminate against Jews via BDS or threaten them with genocide and terrorism, pledges to defend the Jewish community remain meaningless. As we’ve seen in the last year—in Boulder, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; Manchester, England; and last month on Bondi Beach in Australia—such advocacy and the indifference of governments to those who engage in, let alone those, like Mamdani, who endorse it, leads to bloodshed and death.

New York would not be the first great city of the world to be destroyed by ideology. Its residents should recognize what the welfare state, hostility to capitalism and a blind faith in government did to their city in the mid-20th century, only to see it revive when centrists like Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg chose different and more rational paths. And they witnessed how those achievements could be undermined by incompetent leftist governance and the willingness to confuse sensible police policy with racism during the eight years of Bill de Blasio’s tenure. They can also look abroad to places like London, where leftist toleration and encouragement of Islamist antisemitism have harmed Jewish civilian life and society in general.

That is also why the proper response to the Mamdani mayoralty can’t be to treat it like any ordinary transfer of power in an elective office. The new mayor is a skillful politician and an even better talker, and his youth and eloquence give him clear advantages as he sets forth to remake the city and use it to further his long war on Israel and the Jews. Those who seek compromise and think they can prevent him from doing harm by being co-opted into his administration are deceiving themselves.

Mamdani’s socialism should be resisted by other levels of government, whether in Albany or Washington. So, too, should his efforts to defend antisemitism.

As he staffs his administration with people who share his comfort with bigotry or promote forms of discrimination against Jews, those who claim to represent the Jewish community, as well as all other people of good faith, mustn’t be deterred by his popularity or press support. His administration must be resisted with every legal and political tactic that can be employed. Anything less won’t just be a moral failure. It will be an invitation for both the mayor and his followers to proceed with their project of dismantling Jewish rights, along with those of everyone else.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

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