‘Time to smell the kosher turkey bacon’

Andrew D. Lappin

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New York mayoral candidate, State Rep. Zohran Mamdani (D-N.Y.) speaks to supporters during an election night gathering at The Greats of Craft LIC in the Long Island City neighborhood of the Queens borough in New York City, June 24, 2025. Mamdani was announced as the winner of the Democratic nomination for mayor in a crowded field in the city’s mayoral primary to choose a successor to Mayor Eric Adams, who is running for re-election on an independent ticket. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

I prayed fervently that U.S. President Donald Trump would “bunker bust” Iran’s Fordow nuclear site. And he exceeded my prayers by also neutralizing both the Natanz and Ifshan nuclear lairs.

Operation Midnight Hammer not only materially neutered Iran’s nuclear program; it validated the reassertion of the right and the obligation of opposing evil with force. In a world where the vice grip of totalitarianism seems to gain every day over democracy, that was no small statement. 

But this astounding victory for the “free world” has neither lightened my heart nor uplifted my spirit. Unlike Israel’s victory in 1967, which ignited the pride and unity of the Jewish soul, this event has left me feeling anxious and uncertain.

Perhaps that’s because running parallel to the existential threat of Iranian nuclear capability is the globally virulent rise of antisemitism. And whereas ending the existential nuclear threat was possible, mitigating the surge of antisemitism is a vastly more complex task.

Neutering Iran was an essential step in confronting the global surge of antisemitism, camouflaged as anti-Zionism, but Iran regretfully is not the only spigot that must be shut. 

Revealed after Oct. 7, 2023, was the dumbfounding awakening of the depth of anti-Zionism within the fabric of the Democratic Party’s left wing. Isolationism, residing within the far-right wing of the Republican Party, is no less virulent. However, it is far less of a threat because isolationists, in step with white supremacists, and unlike progressives, wear their heinous ideology very visibly. 

Progressives of the far left have deceptively cloaked their anti-Zionist agenda behind a veil of human rights. Worming their way into the American body politic as avengers of injustice and protectors of black, brown and all non-white, they have gained a status of a protected species. 

It has been a compellingly disarming costume by which Jews and non-Jewish Americans have stood by in impotence, numbly observing the stealthy incursion.  

The nomination of Zohran Mamdani, a known anti-Zionist, as the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City best exemplifies the underlying political avalanche about to hit the Jewish community.    

The core of our problem is that we have, since the 1990s, been a community divided between Jewish Americans and American Jews, living in an “Alice in Wonderland” bubble of toleration and acceptance. 

American Jews believed that their “loyalty” as Americans ensured Israel’s protection under the umbrella of American power.  Whereas Jewish Americans read history from an angle that focused on Israel’s security deficit within the context of living in an oil-thirsty world, amongst the volatility of a hostile Islamic region, while being refereed by the fickle court of “world opinion.” 

And our adversaries wasted no time in cunningly using that divide to squeeze through the fissure. The rise in antisemitism is, among other signs, a reflection of the awareness of our adversaries, whose sixth sense has correctly interpreted the opportunity created in the face of Jewish disunity and the dysfunction resulting therefrom.     

So here we are today, divided, weakened in dysfunctionality and mortified at the idea that the “Alice in Wonderland” bubble, in which we have thrived so remarkably over the last seventy years, is about to pop. And despite what we see, our fear has blinded us as we continue to cling relentlessly to the world as it was, instead of the world as it is.  

Another factor in the continuing political paralysis of Jews, the vast majority of whom disdain President Trump, is the admission that antisemitism is a problem of sufficient danger to abandon the path on which we traveled during the days of the “Alice in Wonderland” bubble. 

True, polls by major Jewish organizations reflect that 85% of the Jewish community is aware and fearful of antisemitism, but those same polls show that Jews would rather invest their energy fighting Trump than visibly supporting his far-reaching policies that have protected Jews domestically and in Israel. 

Etched collectively in our Jewish souls is the fantasy that the horrors of the Holocaust punctuated a universal revulsion of Jewish genocide.  The historical anomaly in which Jews have prospered safely over the last generation and a half created the illusion of an irreversible linear advancement.

But the election of Zohran Mamdani, cheered openly by identified pro-Hamas activists, in a city with the highest concentration of Jews outside of Tel Aviv, demands that if for nothing else but for the protection of our grandchildren, we acknowledge what we see and respond by arming ourselves with the most powerful of antidotes: Jewish unity.

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Andrew D. Lappin is a redeveloper of urban industrial properties. He is a board member of the Ember Foundation, the Middle East Forum, NGO Monitor and Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA)

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