Does the Democratic Nominee for NYC's Mayor Promote Antisemitism

Paper by Dr. Jack Frank Sigman

I was invited to a discussion of the above-referenced paper on Academia.edu. I did not participate in the discussion, and I am not copying the entire paper—only the first paragraph. I am including the discussion that followed. I have not proofread or changed their wording.

“I overheard a conversation. It was about the Democratic Party nominee for the mayor of New York City. One person claimed he is an anti-semite, the other said they never heard him say anything that is antisemitic, and that he is just being pro-Palestinian, which is not a crime. There are three ways that are pro-Palestinian and antisemitic in nature and intent, and that are: support for the BDS campaign, and supporting the ideas behind the slogans “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Globalize the Infiada.”

Here is the discussion: Elad Ben David

9 hrs ago

As part of my research, I contend that the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism resides in a complex gray area that necessitates a clear and careful distinction. While these two phenomena can sometimes overlap, they are not inherently synonymous. Anti-Zionist positions can indeed be rooted in antisemitic ideology, but not all expressions of anti-Zionism should be automatically labeled as antisemitic. Such conflation risks undermining legitimate political critique and diluting the gravity of actual antisemitism. Therefore, in the case of Mamdani, if his critique is directed solely at the policies and ideology of the State of Israel—without expressing hostility or prejudice toward Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group—it becomes problematic to categorize his stance as antisemitic. In the absence of animus toward Jewish people, labeling such criticism as antisemitism conflates political dissent with racial or religious hatred, which does a disservice to both the fight against antisemitism and the integrity of political debate.

Wakisa Moses Sesema

What's really wrong with the mighty bastion of democracy in the whole world, they claim that someone stands against atrocities in Gaza, according to the law of proportion the suffering of Palestinians doesn't equate or in other worlds this massive suffering is out of this world. So when new crop of politicians come out to stand for the voice of the voiceless they are called antisemitic. This term is coined to avoid people to criticize of debate and reason which is cornerstone of democracy. We should be promoting healthy debates rather than criticizing and Labelling someone a jew hater. I think the Israeli Lobby has done much damage to US politics, the US and Israel are hated cause they put themselves in this likely position of intervening and causing chaos by supporting Israel and fighting their wars. Mamdani is just another democratic candidate that came to speak and stand for NY, just reason that Cuomo and the other candidate cared about Israel and what ordinary citizen of NY on street live. We shouldn't say he's antisemitic, whilst running away from healthier debates. You know what the whole US politics is based on defending Israel unlike their nation interest.

Dr. Jack Sigman, PH.D

5 hrs ago

Exactly what aspect of anti-Zionism is not antisemitic? Additionally, Mamdani supports the antisemitic movement, BDS, and the antisemitic slogans - from the river to the sea and globalize the intifada. You do not get to chose what it means to you (a cheap way to deny antisemitism by saying "But that is not what I meant.") So many antisemitic tropes, so little desire to debate this nonsense over and over again. There is no law of proportion. Hamas attack on Israel on 10/7 was classically genocide. Israel legal response is a defensive war. It is what "never again" means.

Jaap Bosma

8 hrs ago

Again a bullshit, racist article from Sigman. The UN charter prescibes the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples. It means that every state should be the state of all the people that belong to its territory. Israel wants to be the atate of the Jewiah people, which is racist against Palestinians. The problem is that Israel is a racist state. It is a racist state that practices ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide. Opposing that is not antisemitic but antiracist. Supporting it, as Sigman does, is racist What's really wrong with the mighty bastion of democracy in the whole world, they claim that someone stands against atrocities in Gaza, according to the law of proportion the suffering of Palestinians doesn't equate or in other worlds this massive suffering is out of this world. So when new crop of politicians come out to stand for the voice of the voiceless they are called antisemitic. This term is coined to avoid people to criticize of debate and reason which is cornerstone of democracy. We should be promoting healthy debates rather than criticizing and Labelling someone a jew hater. I think the Israeli Lobby has done much damage to US politics, the US and Israel are hated cause they put themselves in this likely position of intervening and causing chaos by supporting Israel and fighting their wars. Mamdani is just another democratic candidate that came to speak and stand for NY, just reason that Cuomo and the other candidate cared about Israel and what ordinary citizen of NY on street live. We shouldn't say he's antisemitic, whilst running away from healthier debates. You know what the whole US politics is based on defending Israel unlike their nation interest.

Dr. Jack Sigman, PH.D

9 hrs ago

So many antisemitic tropes, so little desire to debate this nonsense over and over again. There is no law of proportion. Hamas attack on Israel on 10/7 was classically genocide. Israel legal response is a defensive war. It is what "never again" means.

Robert Hirsch

14 hrs ago

Please read: What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Really Means Bret Stephens NYT, July 1, 2025 www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/opinion/mamdani-intifada-israel.html. Zohran Mamdani got three chances to repudiate the expression “globalize the intifada” in a weekend interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. It would have been easy, and politically smart, for the Democratic candidate for New York mayor to say that he’d been educated about the phrase’s violent connotation and that he regretted not rejecting it sooner. Instead, he ducked each time, saying that although he does not use those words himself, he would decline to “police” the language of others. So give Mamdani credit for this: He has the courage of his convictions. Now he ought to bear the responsibility for them, too. I was a journalist living and working in Jerusalem when I got a taste of what the word “intifada,” Arabic for “shaking off,” means in practice. I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing. My wife, whom I hadn’t yet met, was due to be in the cafe when it blew up but had changed plans at the last minute. Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit. Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. Among the dead were Sarah Levy-Hoffman, Clara Rosenberger and Frieda Britvich, all of them Auschwitz survivors. Two days after that there was an attack on a Jerusalem supermarket. Two were murdered: a security guard named Haim Smadar, a father of six, who stopped the bomber from coming into the store, and a high school senior named Rachel Levy. Rachel would have been about 40 now had she only not been at the wrong place at the wrong instant. Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day. On Jan. 29, 2004, at 8:48 a.m., I was fussing over my newborn daughter in her crib when I heard a loud boom and saw a plume of black smoke rise from Azza Street, behind my apartment. I was at the scene within three minutes and wrote down what I saw later that evening. The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood. In the carnage, I failed to spot a reporter who worked for me, Erik Schechter. His injuries were described as “moderate,” meaning shrapnel wounds, vascular damage and a shattered kneecap. He spent months in recovery. There were many more atrocities in Israel over following years, culminating in the orgy of murder, rape and kidnapping that was Oct. 7, 2023. But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.” There are rich and legitimate debates to be had about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy toward it. None of us should look away at the devastating toll the war in Gaza exacts on Palestinian civilians. And nobody has a monopoly on truth or virtue: Those who want to condemn Israeli policy are fully within their rights. But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews. There are liberals and progressives who’ll continue to make excuses for Mamdani. They will argue that his views on “globalize the intifada” are beside the point of his agenda for New York. They will observe that he has a predictable share of far-left Jewish supporters. They will play semantic games about the original meaning of “intifada.” To those supporters, one can say only good luck. They’re making Donald Trump’s case about the radical direction of too much of the Democratic Party better than he ever could.

Mipham Jampa

13 hrs ago

Great letter. Nonetheless, you end it with a seeming regret that the Democrats are doing the wrong thing, as though their normal state is in fact normal. They are not, nor have they been for quite some time normal. Their underlying modus operandi includes incredible racism of the anti-black and anti-semitic type going back even early than arch-racist Woodrow Wilson-back to when Jefferson Davis was splitting the country as a preface to a war where the Democrats in the South wished to preserve slavery. Now they easily disguise their anti-Semitism as a party with the help of the media, and compliant-even Jewish-politicians. They don't so easily disguise it with the likes of AOC, Sanders (a Jew himself), Pelosi (we can't decry anti-Semitism), Ilhan Omar (it's the Benjamins), and many more Democrats-even jewish ones who refuse to fight for Jews or Israel.

Ben Dor A.

13 hrs ago

There is enough online information on this person, his thoughts, behavior, and beliefs. If the Jewish residents of NYC still vote for such a person, then they have a genuine problem understanding the nature of Islam ☪️ and its followers. It also shows that they do not understand American politics and how it is manipulated by the cult of death. What has happened in NYC since the 7th of Oct 2023, should have all red lights flashing. The perspective danger to the Jewish community reflects a lack of comprehension regarding the intricacies of the American political landscape. It suggests a failure to grasp the dynamics that shape political discourse and decision-making processes. Moreover, it implies that the Jewish public misunderstands the various influences at play within the system. Such a viewpoint indicates a need for deeper analysis and a more nuanced understanding of the subject matter.

Dr. Jack Sigman, PH.D

14 hrs ago

This is the first part of a three part series regarding Zohar Mamdani's possible promotion of antisemitism.

Mipham Jampa

13 hrs ago

"Possible?"

Summary:

The central question, though not explicitly posed, was this: When does critique of Israel become antisemitism—and who gets to decide?

One participant, Elad Ben David, sought clarity through distinction. He argued that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not inherently the same, and that the conflation of the two obscures both real hatred and legitimate critique. If a politician like Zohran Mamdani critiques Israeli policy without expressing hostility toward Jews as a group, Ben David argued, then labeling him antisemitic does more harm than good.

But this perspective was swiftly and sharply countered by Dr. Jack Sigman, who rejected nuance in favor of certainty. Sigman asserted that support for BDS or slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the intifada” are inherently antisemitic, regardless of the speaker’s intent. For Sigman, October 7, 2023—what he called a genocidal attack by Hamas—was the most recent proof that anti-Zionist rhetoric carries murderous consequences.

Wakisa Moses Sesema and Mipham Jampa painted the term “antisemitism” as a tool of censorship, wielded to suppress dissent about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. They accused political and media elites of distorting democratic debate, warning that the U.S.’s alignment with Israel compromises both justice abroad and political integrity at home.

Ben Dor A. suggested that if Jewish New Yorkers voted for Mamdani, they failed to understand the “nature of Islam” or American politics.

Others used the opportunity not to analyze Mamdani’s statements but to attack the Democratic Party as inherently antisemitic, with historical grievances reaching back to Woodrow Wilson and beyond.

Robert Hirsch offered a personal reflection. He gave emotional and historical weight to the word “intifada.” For him, Mamdani’s refusal to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada” wasn’t a matter of political expression but of moral complicity. Yet, Hirsch acknowledged the legitimacy of criticism toward Israeli policy and the moral complexity of war. He drew a line between legitimate criticism of Israel and language that, intentionally or not, gives support or encouragement to those who commit violence against Jews.

Ultimately, the thread revealed less about Mamdani himself and more about the fault lines that cut through contemporary political discourse.

This discussion is highly polarized, and most participants seem to speak past one another. Rather than engaging with nuance or seeking mutual understanding, the thread largely serves as a platform for reaffirming pre-existing beliefs. Jews are increasingly seen through the lens of Israel. The conflation of Jewish identity with Israeli state policy is apparent. Both defenders and critics of Israel treat Jews as proxies for imperialism, victimhood, nationalism, or resistance. Several responses implicitly or explicitly deny Jews the right to define antisemitism for themselves, instead accusing them of using it to suppress debate. This reflects a growing resentment of Jewish self-definition. If they support Israel, they are seen as endorsing apartheid, racism, or genocide. If they criticize Israel, they are disloyal. While Hirsch offers a detailed, emotional recollection of the terrorist attack, this testimony is not met with empathy; it’s treated with suspicion or dismissed outright. There is an apparent absence of reciprocal listening, which indicates a breakdown in social trust: the pain of Jewish communities is not being heard in good faith.

I remain unwilling to participate, precisely because of the evident lack of willingness to listen. Still, I respect Dr. Jack Sigman, Ph.D., for initiating this discussion.