Radio Free New Hampshire: How To Lose A Million And Why

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

The headline of a recent article in the New York Times was self-explanatory: “Many Jewish Voters Back Mamdani,” declared our nation’s newspaper of record.

This was news because of Mamdani’s pronounced anti-Zionism. Reporter Liam Stack added a caveat, though. “It is difficult to determine how many Jewish voters supported Mr. Mamdani because even in New York, the Jewish population is too small to be measured with precision by most polls.”

While I am no journalist, I know the difference between reporting and opinion, and this was presented as reporting. But I wondered about that assertion so I looked it up.

A quick Google search of reputable sources gives you a population of around one million, good enough for the Wall Street Journal, which cited a figure of 944,000 as recently as one year ago. In informing their readers about Mamdani’s appeal, Mr. Stack and his employers erased one million Jews.

More research: Mr. Stack went to Georgetown, then New York University. He studied Middle Eastern history in both places, then he worked in Egypt. He has won major awards. Now he writes with authority about the politics of Jewish New Yorkers and he manages to not know how to use Google.

Now let’s try to understand. He and his editors must have had good cause to erase those Jews. Perhaps they are all personal friends with a Jew who voted for Mamdani. If so, I’m happy for them. It’s good to have a Jewish friend in New York City. That way you can claim to know where the best bagels are, because being a New Yorker is all about being authentic.

Or perhaps they had other ideas in mind. The real story here, after all, isn’t that a handful of Jews voted for Mamdani. It’s that those same Jews must agree that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, which lets everyone else off the hook for saying the same thing. That’s a more serious topic, requiring a larger lens -- unless you wish to short-circuit the whole debate by declaring it effectively closed.

Perhaps in deciding to do this, Mr. Stack recalled that Zionism arose during the era of settler-colonialism, when the Ottomans and the British both bolstered their title to the backwater province of Palestine by filling it with poor Arabs from elsewhere, people with no ties to that land but who later claimed to own it. Perhaps he even gave a nod to the birth pangs of Israel itself in 1948, when the Jews of the old Middle East were violently expelled from their homes and herded towards the sea by the hundreds of thousands.

Perhaps Mr. Stack had a keen eye peeled for the division of the Indian subcontinent in those same years, when millions of Muslims and Hindus were uprooted to produce the modern countries of Pakistan and India. The world gets built with such horrors, time after time. Maybe he even shed a tear for the ethnic Germans who were pushed at Soviet bayonet-point across eastern Europe in that same aftermath of World War Two, urged by rape and murder to make new homes for themselves in Germany itself. Precious little good came of Nazi expansionism.

Or maybe Mr. Stack recalled the origins of the Irish republic, when hard men like Michael Collins negotiated peace and partition with Britain only to be killed by their fellow rebels as traitors to the cause (that deadly argument has only lasted another century). Collins was said to have remarked that by signing that treaty, he was signing his own death warrant. He was right. Palestine has yet to produce a Michael Collins.

Or maybe none of those things apply, because while history is written by the winners, poetry is written by the losers, and the people who work for and read the New York Times live in the sort of poetic vacuum where a million Jews can simply disappear, and the plight of Gaza’s children stands on its own, divorced from history, context, and sense.

I am of two minds when it comes to Donald Trump’s war on this country’s elite; its colleges, its law firms, its journalists. He is destroying our nation’s science infrastructure, which will haunt us for years. He is also making anti-semitic speech the litmus test for freedom of expression: an entire generation of students and writers now finds its easiest thrill in talking against the Jews. Yet this elite also produces people like Mr. Stack and his editors and his readership. The progressive movement is doing something new and improved these days. They are making it so that Jews don’t matter at all. That neat trick leaves me chilled both coming and going.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.