Is Tucker Carlson normalizing antisemitism on the right?

Jonathan S. Tobin

Conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson speaks during the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA who was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., on Sept. 21, 2025. Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images.

Extremists always pose a dilemma for mainstream politicians and journalists. Ideally, the best way of dealing with them is to ignore them. Hate-mongers thrive when they are able to seize the spotlight and hold onto it. Deprived of attention, they wither on the vine when they are confined to the fever swamps of the far right or left, where most people don’t seem to notice or care about them.

However, if their audiences are sufficiently large and they are treated by people who matter, whether national figures or opinion leaders, as falling within the proverbial Overton Window of acceptable discourse, ignoring them isn’t really an option.

And that is the problem with Tucker Carlson.

The former Fox News host turned podcaster doesn’t just have a massive audience of viewers of his program and followers on social media. He’s also still treated as someone who not only matters but is acceptable company to keep for the president and vice president of the United States, as well as lesser figures in the conservative ecosphere of politicians, pundits, podcasters and journalists.

That is how the ideas he promotes—whether in his own voice or by platforming them on his podcast—are, by extension, also treated as something that normal people should consider as worth debating, if not acceptable in their own right.

Platforming hate

So, when Carlson hosts an open antisemite like Nick Fuentes, who speaks of his desire to drive “Zionist Jews” out of American public life, in the course of what can only be described as a friendly conversation in which they debate how far to go in their opposition to Israel and its Jewish supporters, it’s not only deplorable. It’s an obvious sign of how antisemitism on the right is not a problem that can be dismissed as unimportant or uncommon. Rather, it’s a moment when a tipping point may be about to be reached, when it will no longer be possible to describe conservative Jew-hatred as insignificant.

That’s long been the position of most Jewish conservatives, and they weren’t wrong to think that way. In recent decades, antisemitism has been mainstreamed on the political left while remaining marginal on the right.

The intersectional left-wing base of the Democratic Party has largely adopted the mindset of fashionable academic ideology that conceives of Israel and Jews as “white” oppressors of people of color. They falsely view Israel as a product of “settler-colonialism,” instead of an expression of self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland, where they are indigenous.

That is the basis for the willingness of so many on the political left to accept the blood libels about the Jewish state committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip that have flooded the liberal media since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. And it’s why Democrats are now overwhelmingly an anti-Israel party, as polls now show and as has been demonstrated in congressional votes, where most of the members of their caucuses have supported banning weapons sales to Israel. Even those Democrats who long claimed to be strong backers of the Jewish state, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), have started to largely abandon it.

Extremists are going mainstream

The most prominent manifestation of the rising tide of Jew-hatred that has swept the globe in the last two years has emanated from the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists. The best American example of this is the way that New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a veteran Israel-hater and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is on the verge of becoming the next mayor of New York City with support from mainstream Democrats.

This has stood in strong contrast to Republicans, who have become largely a lockstep pro-Israel party in the last few decades. Conservative Christians and others on the right have been ardent supporters of Israel, even eclipsing most Jewish groups in their willingness to stick with it in the face of the vilification that has rained down on it since the terrorist atrocities of Oct. 7. While the left and its leading publications have continued to mainstream and normalized antisemitism as well as the demonization of Israel, the right has stood firm with few exceptions, backing President Donald Trump’s historic pro-Israel policies.

In this way, critics of the left could argue that while antisemitism remained alive on the far right, it was marginal and contradicted by the stands of anyone who counted in the Republican Party and mainstream conservative thought.

But the tsunami of post-Oct. 7 Jew-hatred, driven by animus for Israel, has also made itself felt on the right.

Various figures who might have been characterized as part of the lunatic fringe have in recent years been gaining a toehold in the public square. Fuentes and Daryl Cooper are two such examples. And the person who is giving them a leg up is Carlson, who had them on his podcast.

Cooper is the amateur historian, Holocaust denier and antisemite hosted by Carlson last fall. Carlson praised him as the “most important popular historian of our time” and allowed him to float his bizarre theories about Winston Churchill being the villain of the Second World War, as opposed to Adolf Hitler, and that the deaths of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were the result of logistical problems caused by the war rather than a deliberate campaign of extermination by the Nazis and their collaborators.

He was widely criticized after that episode for platforming and endorsing lies about history. Though this was far from the first time that Carlson had made clear his animus for Israel and the Jews—something that had become a staple of his program since Oct. 7—he continued to be treated as a member of the Trump family inner circle and a friend of Vice President JD Vance, as well as embraced by most of the mainstream conservative pundits as a legitimate public figure.

Demonizing Jews

But his latest show with Fuentes, in which he plays the same “I’m just asking questions” role while giving a boost to a hate-monger, makes his comfort with open antisemitism even more obvious.

The 27-year-old Fuentes is a notorious white nationalist, antisemite and Holocaust denier who has a wide following on the far right. He and his supporters are known as groypers and, as is typical of such extremists, have long been more focused on opposing mainstream and even deeply conservative Republicans because they are supporters of Israel than in opposing the left.

His opinions are unvarnished neo-Nazism, replete with dark warnings about slaughtering Jewish “devil-worshippers” once he and his followers take power. He has said “I love Hitler” and attacked “Talmudic Jews” (i.e., Jews of all denominations who practice post-biblical Judaism) as a threat to the world. He blames the Jews for everything, even alleging that Israel was responsible for the fact that he accidentally live-streamed LGBTQ pornography on his website.

He was an avowed opponent of the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian Zionist. Kirk, who has taken on the reputation of a secular saint since his assassination last month, went so far as to deride the hate-monger as “vermin” and vowed never to have anything to do with him. But in an odd twist, Fuentes has seemed to gain prominence since Kirk was murdered. And that was apparently the cue for Carlson to invite him onto his program, where the two engaged in an amicable exchange for more than two hours during the course of which Fuentes vented his hate for Jews.

It is true that at one point in the conversation, Carlson contrasted his own brand of hate with that of Fuentes, saying that he liked Jews who shared his opposition to Israel, like journalist Glenn Greenwald. He claimed that his Christian beliefs led him not to seek to target Jews per se, though he regarded Israel and its supporters as a threat to America and claimed that he hated Christian Zionists like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, “more than anybody” because they are practitioners of “Christian heresy.”

That’s an astonishing confession for someone who was allowed to speak at the Kirk memorial service, where he engaged in traditional tropes of antisemitism without rebuke from the organizers or other speakers.

That is also a position that he often mentions in his newsletter, claiming that Israel and AIPAC control U.S. foreign policy while defending Qatar’s far more extensive information and influencing buying operations as exemplary—something that has fed suspicions that his efforts are being financed, either directly or indirectly, by Doha.

By treating Fuentes as a legitimate figure whose opinions ought to be known, Carlson did exactly what he attempted to do with Cooper. In platforming Fuente’s rants, replete with standard antisemitic tropes about Jews being a “stateless people and unassimilable,” as well as a unique threat to the United States that must be ended, Carlson was going beyond his previous dalliances with Jew-hatred that were mostly focused on bashing the State of Israel.

The far left and far right agree

Listen closely to their exchanges, and it becomes clear that there is little difference between that and the positions of Mamdani. While the New York mayoral candidate’s opposition to Israel and the Jews is dressed up in different language, Fuentes, Carlson and Mamdani all believe that Israel is at the center of a conspiracy against their vision of justice. 

Jew-hatred isn’t just being unkind to Jews or prejudiced against them. It’s an idea rooted in politics which alleges that the Jews are the obstacle to all that is good, in much the same way that some religions depict Satan.

For Mamdani and others among the intersectional left, Israel is the lynchpin of international settler-colonialism and racism, such as when—in the course of supporting the defunding of police in 2023—he said “that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

For Carlson and Fuentes, Israel is the obstacle to a true “America First,” or rather, “America only” foreign policy in which the United States will achieve freedom from the foreign influences that they think are dragging it under and suborning white Christian dominance.

Whether you lean left or right, if your guiding principle is that all of the evil in the world always leads back to Jews and/or Israel, then you are a textbook example of antisemitism.

Barring a turnabout in the next few days, Mamdani is about to become mayor of New York, and his allies are entrenched as the leaders of the Democratic Party with a real chance of attaining power in the coming years, while Carlson, Fuentes and fellow antisemite Candace Owens are merely prattling away on podcasts.

But that is no reason for conservatives to dismiss Carlson as insignificant.

Just as the intersectional left slowly gained traction during the “progressives” long march through educational, cultural and political institutions, so, too, could right-wing antisemites do the same—or at least make major inroads among conservatives if left unchecked.

A line must be drawn 

More to the point, so long as Carlson is welcome at the White House and other conservative pundits like Megyn Kelly not only won’t condemn him, but take umbrage at the suggestion that they are morally obligated to do so, his attitude toward antisemitism will become normalized on the right.

Trump blundered back in 2022 when he publicly dined with rapper/antisemite Kanye West and Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. He subsequently disavowed the former’s hate and said he had no idea who Fuentes was. And he characteristically refused to apologize.

Since then, he’s stayed away from that pair, but he also set an example by which others on the right have been able to continue associating with people like Carlson. In opposing calls to isolate or condemn him, some conservatives have said that they are supporting free speech and don’t want to mimic the left’s attempts to “cancel” people whose views they don’t like.

Nevertheless, unless a line in the sand is drawn between the Trump administration and other leading conservatives and such open antisemites, it isn’t going to be possible to go on pretending that there is a tangible difference between the attitudes of the right and the left when it comes to antisemitism. Anyone who isn’t willing to do that, no matter where they are on the political spectrum, must stand accused of complicity in the normalization of Jew-hatred.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

A Warning From London Following Mamdani’s Election Victory in New York

Jonathan Sacerdoti

New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City marks a turning point in US urban politics, and its reverberations are already being felt well beyond the five boroughs.

To many on the American left, Mamdani represents hope: a democratic socialist, the son of immigrants, a man who speaks of fairness, affordability, and restoring dignity to those pushed to the margins of urban life. But to many others, especially within Jewish communities, his rise is deeply alarming.

From London, a city that has lived with a Muslim mayor for nearly a decade, the moment feels familiar. It also feels fraught.

It is worth stating at the outset that Sadiq Khan, for all the criticism he has faced, did not enter office with the same background of inflammatory or extremist statements as Mamdani. His political record was grounded in more mainstream Labour politics, and while he became a symbol of Britain’s multicultural ambitions, his own rhetoric rarely courted controversy of the kind now surrounding Mamdani.

As a life-long citizen of London, it is not clear even to me how responsible our mayor is for the alarming levels of antisemitism infecting our streets these days, nor how much of that responsibility is down to his Muslim identity. It shouldn’t matter what religion a mayor is, unless their religion influences their decisions in a way which runs counter to the wider society’s values and culture. But therein lies the problem — to trace the causes of almost intangible but very real cultural shifts and social tensions is virtually impossible in the moment.

Mamdani’s path to City Hall is undeniably historic. At 34, he is the youngest mayor in more than a century and the first Muslim to lead New York. His campaign energized hundreds of thousands — young voters, working-class immigrants, and a progressive base long disillusioned with establishment politics. His victory speech was filled with the language of empowerment: “This city belongs to you,” he told supporters, naming Yemeni bodega owners, Senegalese taxi drivers, and Mexican grandmothers among the architects of his movement.

Yet this language of inclusion exists alongside a record that many see as exclusionary, particularly toward Jews and supporters of Israel. Mamdani is a vocal supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which ultimately seeks to eliminate the world’s lone Jewish state. He has said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested in New York under an ICC warrant, refused to repudiate the slogan “globalize the intifada,” and once stated at a Democratic Socialists of America conference that “we don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD [New York Police Department] is racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety.” Jewish groups, moderate Democrats, and survivors of repressive regimes are right to be concerned.

The anxiety is not merely ideological. In the aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israel, antisemitic incidents surged across the West, including in New York and London. In that atmosphere, Mamdani’s framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in starkly anti-Israel terms, with no serious reckoning with the brutality of Hamas, struck many as morally evasive at best and hostile at worst. His critics question his judgment, and they are not wrong to do so.

In the UK, we have lived through some of these debates with Khan. London’s mayor is a Muslim of South Asian heritage, and Mamdani, though born in Uganda, is of Indian heritage through both parents. Khan speaks in the register of cosmopolitan liberalism. His supporters celebrate his ascent as proof of Britain’s openness. His critics, especially outside London, view his leadership as symbolic of a city that has drifted away from national cultural norms. Though no credible evidence links Khan’s policies to religious ideology, the perception of an unspoken alignment with Islamist grievances has persisted among some critics.

This perception has been shaped by moments that transcend formal policy. Public Ramadan displays in central London, including large-scale installations inaugurated by Khan, have been celebrated as signs of inclusivity, but many argue that Christian festivals have not received similar visibility. In late 2024, a halal-finance advertising campaign run across London’s transport system, ultimately regulated by Khan, featured provocative imagery and religious overtones, prompting accusations that public space was being used to promote a particular faith’s commercial ecosystem.

The truth is people might be less concerned about religious adverts from other faiths which they perceive as less aggressively set on conquest and conversion — an uncomfortable but worthwhile thought to keep in mind. London along with other major UK cities has also seen numerous intimidating street protests where Muslim men have worshipped in the street, paraded terrorist flags, and even burnt a car whilst holding a Quran aloft on top of a police van (in Leeds last week).

This current climate matters. And these perceptions, however incomplete or distorted, matter. They cannot simply be dismissed as racist or xenophobic, and doing so is counterproductive. The fear many Jews feel in New York today is not an invention either. It is not merely a media creation. It is based on real experiences, real statements, and a broader climate in which antisemitism is often recast as political critique. But nor should these concerns be weaponized with reckless rhetoric. We have seen in Britain how public discourse can descend into paranoia when criticism is expressed in conspiratorial or racially charged terms. If critics of Mamdani wish to be heard, they must be precise, restrained, and grounded. Otherwise, they will be shouted down by the very people they hope to persuade.

Khan himself has sometimes contributed to the perception of grievance politics. In April 2024, he apologized to Britain’s Chief Rabbi for implying that criticism of his position on Gaza was influenced by his Muslim-sounding name. He admitted that he felt held to a different standard due to his faith, but accepted that his comment was unfair. There is a broad unease about how religion, ethnicity, and political critique intersect in public life, and pretending otherwise will not help allay people’s fears.

What happens next in New York is impossible to predict. As in London, the city’s institutional constraints, budgetary realities, and legal frameworks will limit how much any mayor can reshape it. But politics is not just about budgets or buses. It is about the values a city embodies, the identities it elevates, and the signals it sends to its people. In electing Mamdani, New Yorkers have made a powerful statement. Whether that statement fosters solidarity or division will depend on how he governs, and how his critics respond.

London may offer some lessons, but it is not a template. The United States and the United Kingdom differ in their histories, their social structures, and their ideological battle lines. Still, both countries are wrestling with similar questions: What happens when the politics of social justice collide with the politics of ethnic identity? Can a city led by a figure deeply polarizing to one community still represent the whole?

We do not yet know how this story will unfold. But we should pay close attention. New York is not just another city. It is, in many ways, the stage on which the future of liberal democracy will be tested. And its new mayor stands at the very center of that test.

Wytwórnia Sprzętu Komunikacyjnego w Świdniku, motocykl WSK, 1979 r. Fot. PAP/Zbigniew Jaśkiewicz

Historia jednej fotografii z Bazy Zdjęć PAP: 40 lat temu zakończono produkcję motocykli w Polsce

Tomasz Szczerbicki (PAP)

31 października 1985 r. w Świdniku zmontowano ostatni motocykl WSK 125 M06 B3, był to zarazem ostatni polski motocykl z produkcji seryjnej.

What made a Mamdani win possible? Demography and normalizing antisemitism

Jonathan S. Tobin

Supporters at the Brooklyn Paramount n the Brooklyn borough of New York City celebrate after Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman, is announced the winner in the city’s mayoral race on Nov. 4, 2025. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

In the end, the last four and a half months of arguments and desperate appeals meant nothing. 

The New York City mayoral race was essentially decided on June 24, when New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani decisively won the Democratic Party primary over second-place finisher Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York. All efforts to stop Mamdani from winning in November went essentially for naught. In deep-blue New York City, with the support of the Democratic Party and almost all of the nation’s liberal mainstream media outlets, coupled with the poor alternatives on the ballot, the chances of preventing him from winning the general election were always negligible.

There were good reasons to worry about the consequences of electing not only a Democratic Socialist who will bring a laundry list of Marxist patent nostrums to City Hall, but someone whose political career has been defined by his obsession with opposing Israel and the Jewish people. In the end, though, the main obstacles to the campaign to mobilize the city’s moderate voters and Jews to do everything they could to defeat him were not so much the reluctance of many to vote for Cuomo or Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.

The liberal ecosphere

The real problem is the qualities that should have rendered Mamdani an implausible choice in the eyes of a majority of voters—and therefore unelectable—were no longer seen as disqualifying. Being a Marxist and a supporter of anti-Jewish positions should have relegated Mamdani to the margins of the political spectrum. But among Gotham’s Democrats, that’s no longer true.

In the current liberal political ecosphere, the mayor-elect’s ideology and record had been normalized in the past decade.

In the not-so-distant past, someone like Mamdani would have never stood a chance. But in 2025, a man who had trafficked in blood libels about Israel and the Jews being responsible for New York City cops targeting African-Americans or endorsed chants calling for Jewish genocide and the destruction of Israel (“From the river to the sea”), in addition to terrorism against Jews everywhere (“globalize the intifada”), was not merely acceptable but acclaimed as a breath of fresh air.

The long march of progressives through American institutions over the past decades, during which they have made toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism a new orthodoxy, has taken its toll on society. Along with their imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion that exacerbates racial divisions and labels Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors, their conquest of not merely academia, but much of the nation’s political and cultural establishments prepared the way for accepting Mamdani.

American political liberals of the past century would never have accepted for a minute the idea that a Mamdani could represent them or their party. But if The New York Times is already routinely publishing antisemitic articles calling for Israel’s destruction and falsely labeling it as an “apartheid” state and guilty of “genocide,” it’s obvious that the Overton Window of acceptable discourse has moved to make Jew-hatred kosher in the public square. Why, then, would one expect an electorate dominated by contemporary political liberals to treat a mayoral candidate who did the same as out of bounds?

In the face of that fact, nothing the anti-Mamdani coalition could do could put the genie of antisemitism back into the bottle.

A changed New York

There’s also the plain fact that the electorate of New York City has changed dramatically in the last generation.

The New York that elected Republican Rudy Giuliani twice to the mayoralty in 1993 and 1997—a choice that signaled a remarkable revival of the city both in terms of its economy and livability—and then elected moderate Independent Michael Bloomberg, who is Jewish, in 2001, 2005 and 2009, simply doesn’t exist anymore.

In the last quarter-century, much of the city’s working-class population, including white ethnics and others who shared their values, has left New York for the suburbs or for sunnier, better-governed places such as Florida. That shift was accelerated by the decline set off by the left-wing policies of Bill de Blasio, followed by the incompetence and corruption of Eric Adams, which sent the city into a tailspin.

The increase of Muslim voters, especially those from South Asia and the Middle East, where discriminatory attitudes toward Jews, such as those that Mamdani has exemplified, are normative, has become a major part of that change. They gave him an edge that may have offset any outrage about him from the majority of the still-significant Jewish population in the five boroughs, even as a leftist minority of Jews who have lost touch with any sense of Jewish peoplehood embraced him.

Still, the particular set of circumstances that led to this result came about due to a combination of factors.

Dismal opposition

The first of these is that Mamdani was fortunate in his opponents.

Cuomo was his most plausible alternative; however, convincing people to unite behind a man with a record of thuggish authoritarian rule as governor, costly COVID-19 pandemic blunders, and who was chased out of office in disgrace by charges of sexual harassment and bullying was always a heavy lift.

Sliwa, the founder and leader of the Guardian Angels, was a gadfly candidate of a minority party that commands the support of a fraction of the city’s voters, whom few outside his devoted friends and followers could envision as mayor.

Could they have joined forces with incumbent Mayor Eric Adams to create a fusion ticket that would have defeated Mamdani?

Perhaps that might have been possible if they had done so immediately after the June primary. Yet delusions about what would happen in the general election, as well as egos and hard feelings between them, prevented it. That was unfortunate since it was clear from the start that no one but the former governor had a chance of catching Mamdani. Even if they had, it might not have altered the outcome since Mamdani appears to have won a narrow majority rather than a plurality.

Ironically, the withdrawal from the race of Adams, who chose to run for re-election as an Independent rather than as a Democrat after being saved from corruption charges by President Donald Trump, and his subsequent endorsement of Cuomo, who also switched to run as an Independent after losing in June, may have actually helped Mamdani. Without an African-American or other minority opponent in the field, Mamdani apparently did far better in the general election among blacks and Hispanics than he did in the primary.

Mamdani also benefited from being the most anti-Trump candidate in a city where the president is deeply unpopular.

Ignorant and indoctrinated youth

It’s also true that for a lot of voters, the 34-year-old was a fresh face running against two older men who have been public figures in New York for decades. Young voters liked his Marxist promises of lower rents, cheaper groceries and free bus rides, even if they are unachievable in the largest and overall most expensive city in the country. Apparently, every generation needs to learn the lesson for themselves that socialism doesn’t work. But that is even truer for those who get their information about the world from TikTok and other social media. They may well have also been indoctrinated into believing woke myths about the world by an American education system that is in desperate need of the sort of reform that Trump is attempting to enact with his efforts to rid higher education of DEI and antisemitism.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that New Yorkers have now elected an individual whose entire public career has been largely driven by his opposition to the existence of the State of Israel and the belief that supporting those who seek its destruction is the key to a better world.

This will mean, as he has promised, the implementation of policies targeting Israel and Jews in ways that will be deeply consequential for Jewish New Yorkers. How will this impact their lives?

His election-night promise to oppose antisemitism, which has surged to unprecedented levels in the two years since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, is nothing more than gaslighting, as it was accompanied by his claim that he will also fight the mythical menace of Islamophobia. Since almost everything that is defined as “Islamophobic” is nothing more than drawing attention to the Jew-hatred that is normative among American Muslims and Arab-Americans, his pledge to defend Jews is meaningless.

In Mamdani’s New York, no Jew should think that they can count on the city to protect them. And that is on top of the fact that his pro-criminal policies and hostility to police will make the city less safe for everyone.

Mamdani’s triumph and the support that he’s getting from the country’s liberal establishment will also make the already uphill struggle of moderate and pro-Israel Democrats to keep their party from heading even further to the left even more difficult. At a moment when Democrats are primarily motivated by their hatred for Trump, normalizing Mamdani may seem natural, and perhaps, even inevitable. While that may ultimately harm Democrats in future national elections, there’s no avoiding the fact that it will fuel the increased normalization of Jew-hatred throughout the party, as well as the liberal cultural and media worlds that the left dominates.

A tragic day

Whatever the ultimate political consequences for Democrats, Mamdani’s victory must be marked as a tragic day in the history of American Jewry. Not in living memory has someone who harbors such hostility to this religious minority won high public office in the United States while at the same time being treated by mainstream media as a national political star.

It is the culmination of a process by which vile lies about Israel and the Jews became acceptable public discourse rather than the sort of thing that was confined to the fever swamps of the far left and far right. Conservatives are at least struggling to fend off the efforts of Jew-haters like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and even more hateful figures on that end of the spectrum to establish themselves and their ideas as legitimate on the right. Liberals, however, have effectively surrendered their party to Mamdani and other woke progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and the rest of the antisemitic, progressive “Squad” in Congress.

The result is not just a tragedy for New York Jews, but a milestone in which the efforts of all decent Americans to marginalize antisemites became that much more difficult.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.

Canadian Jewish Groups Demand Toronto Mayor Apologize, Resign for ‘Genocide in Gaza’ Comments

Shiryn Ghermezian

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow speaks to reporters in Toronto, March 8, 2025. Photo: Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via ZUMA Press via Reuters Connect

Several Canadian Jewish organizations are calling for Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow to apologize and even resign for publicly calling Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip a “genocide” during an event on Saturday night.

Chow was speaking at a fundraising gala for the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) at the Pearson Convention Center when she said, “The genocide in Gaza impacts us all,” as seen in videos from the event that were shared on social media.

“A common bond to shared humanity is tested, and I will speak out when children anywhere are feeling the pain and violence and hunger,” she added to applause from the audience. The mayor also compared the suffering Palestinian children face in Gaza to her mother’s experience of being “a child in a warzone” in China when Japan invaded during World War II.

The Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation said Chow should immediately resign after having “the audacity to compare” Israel’s war against a terrorist organization in Gaza to Japan’s invasion of China, and following her “inexcusable” false claims about a genocide.

“The only Gaza genocide was the massacre perpetrated by Hamas and its allies against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. Somehow, we doubt that’s what the mayor was referencing,” said the foundation. It added that the mayor’s genocide claim is not only “false and defamatory” to Israel and its people but also “a calculated insult to the almost 200,000 Jews in the Greater Toronto Area who support Israel, and it exposes the Jewish community to material risk of violence.”

The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) sent a letter to Chow about her “reckless, divisive, and dangerous” comments, and said in a separate statement on X that “such language distorts fact and law, and it legitimizes the hostility and intimidation that Jewish Torontonians are already facing in record numbers.”

Antisemitic hate crimes have spiked in Canada, especially the Toronto area, over the past two years amid the Gaza war, following Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“By echoing that narrative, Mayor Chow lends support to those spreading malicious libels and undermines public confidence in your commitment to the safety, dignity, and inclusion of all Torontonians,” CIJA added. “The Jewish community expects the mayor to make this right by addressing the harm caused and taking immediate action to restore trust and ensure our safety.”

The Canada-Israel Friendship Association accused Chow of promoting “an antisemitic blood libel” by accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza during its war targeting Hamas terrorists who orchestrated the deadly massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Amir Epstein, executive director of the Canadian Jewish civil rights group the Tafsik Organization, called Chow’s comments “disgraceful, reckless and dangerously irresponsible.” Her “genocide in Gaza” remarks were “a slap in the face to Jews in Toronto, across Canada, and around the world — an unforgivable betrayal and a disgraceful distortion of reality,” the statement continued.

“Effective immediately, Mayor Chow is not welcome at any Tafsik Organization events, commemorations, or meetings. Her conduct has failed Toronto, and we reject her presence and participation in our community spaces,” Epstein noted. “We call for Mayor Olivia Chow to be formally excommunicated and permanently rejected by the Jewish community and all Jewish organizations. Providing her a stage … risks legitimizing antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and undermines community safety and integrity.”

B’nai Brith Canada has written to Toronto’s Integrity Commissioner Paul Muldoon, asking him to open an investigation to see if Chow violated the city’s Code of Conduct, which states that elected officials must “ensure that their work environment is free from discrimination and harassment.”

“Making such inaccurate and misleading statements, while representing all Torontonians, sends a harmful and divisive message,” said B’nai Brith Canada. “Toronto deserves leaders who treat every community with respect and act with impartiality. At a time when the mayor should be working to mend divisions and ease tensions, she has instead chosen to inflame them … When a mayor presents a legally disputed claim as fact, it crosses the line from leadership to bias.”