Zohran Mamdani and the limit New York’s Jews must set - opinion

On the third anniversary of October 7, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave the victims of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust one sentence of grief. He named Hamas and its war crimes. Then he turned. 

“The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” he wrote, and the rest of his statement, more than twice as long, was an indictment of Israel: genocide, occupation, apartheid, American tax dollars, and arms shipments.

Jewish organizations responded with outrage, as they have many times before. It is not enough. Outrage is what a provocateur wants. Every condemnation confirms that he holds the power to wound, and he pays nothing for it.

Anyone who has worked with someone who tests limits knows you do not contain that person by shouting. You set a calm, consistent boundary and attach a consequence to it.

First, though, the pattern has to be seen clearly. As a psychoanalyst who has spent decades studying the minds of perpetrators and those who sympathize with them, I look at the structure of a statement rather than its slogans. The structure says more.

The grief was short. Mourning requires the capacity to stay with another person’s pain without needing to change the subject.

The mayor could not stay. When grief for Jews becomes intolerable to someone, it is usually because it threatens a story he needs to believe, in which Jews are never the victims.

The word “Jews” is missing, as the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt pointed out. To name the victims as Jews would be to admit why they were killed.

Hamas did not murder 1,200 people and drag 251 into Gaza because of a policy dispute. It did so because they were Jews.

Erasing the word erases the motive, and erasing the motive clears the way for a reversal: within a few lines, the victim becomes the perpetrator. This is projection in its plainest form.

The wish to annihilate is lifted off the actual killers and placed onto those who defended themselves. Once that move is made, the anniversary no longer belongs to the dead. It belongs to the accuser.

Jewish New Yorkers asked for one day. Not agreement with Israeli policy, not silence on Gaza; just one day on which their dead could be their dead. The mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel could not give them that.

Since a mayor’s words set the city’s emotional temperature, this is about more than hurt feelings. Those who already hate hear that their hatred is righteous. The rise in attacks on Jews in New York did not happen in a vacuum.

So what must be done now?

The boundary should be this: Jewish institutions in New York, including the federations, synagogues, major agencies, and Jewish elected officials, should agree that the mayor will not be invited to Jewish community events, not be given photo opportunities, and will not speak from Jewish platforms.

This holds until he meets one public condition: he must name the victims of October 7 as Jews and acknowledge that they were murdered because they were Jews. The condition is stated once and is not negotiated.

Mamdani needs the image of Jewish acceptance in order to claim he is not hostile to Jews. The community can stop providing it.

Two further steps give the boundary weight. First, the community should hold its own civic October 7 memorial, with the Governor, Council members, and non-Jewish allies standing beside it, so that the city’s memory of that day no longer belongs to the mayor.

Second, every antisemitic incident in New York and the city’s response to it should be documented and sent each month to the City Council, Albany, and the Justice Department. Outrage fades. A record does not.

This asks something of Jewish leaders that outrage does not: discipline. A boundary that one federation honors and another breaks for a ribbon-cutting is worse than none, because it teaches the mayor that the community can be divided.

The limit works only if it is held together.

One sentence of grief followed by a long accusation is not mourning. It is the appropriation of mourning.

Jewish New Yorkers do not need to argue with it. They need to stop lending it their presence.

The writer is a Tel Aviv–based psychoanalyst and counterterrorism scholar. https://www.amazon.com/Nancy-Kobrin/e/B002RF9D5Y