So sayeth Andrew Cuomo: “It’s very simple: anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
On Tuesday, the former New York governor and current New York City mayoral candidate gave a speech at a Manhattan orthodox synagogue arguing that antisemitism is a rising threat in New York City and promising that fighting it would be a centerpiece of his mayoralty. I too am gravely concerned about antisemitism, in this country and around the world. But according to reporting, the speech began with this false premise before metastasizing into a series of slanders against the most prominent mayoral candidates running to his left.
Cuomo’s opening gambit is neither simple nor true. Anti-Zionism is a tradition as old as Zionism.
The Jewish Labor Bund, an anti-Zionist socialist party born in the stretch of Eastern Europe known among Jews as “Yiddishland,” was founded the same year as Zionism and opposed any project of colonization, as it was called even then. There is also a long tradition of religious Jewish anti-Zionism, which happens to have a stronghold in parts of Brooklyn.
Contra Cuomo’s simplistic formulation, there is a long, rich, and diverse legacy of Jewish anti-Zionism, as well as non-Jewish anti-Zionism that has nothing to do with antisemitism.
Yes, there are anti-Zionists who are antisemites. They are no friends to Jews or to the Left. There are also socialists who are sexists, Irish republicans who are anti-Protestant bigots, supporters of a free Tibet who are Christian supremacists, and on and on and on. People are complicated, and some of them are assholes. But their mere existence doesn’t discredit anti-Zionism, socialism, Irish republicanism or Tibetan liberation as political projects or intellectual traditions.
Starting from this false premise, Cuomo went on to propose new rules against mask wearing (against the objections of groups like Jews for Mask Rights) and to punish those who boycott Israeli firms or Israeli-funded…
Auteur: Samuel Stein
