The October 6 Project # 7: Zohran Mamdani, John Lindsay, and the Specter of "Kahanism" in 2025 America

Post Election: What does 1968 have to do with 2025 - * written on the anniversary of Kahane's assassination November 5, 1990

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Amid the election night drama, there was a small fact that passed almost unnoticed but was, for me as a scholar of modern Judaism and a born and bred New Yorker, significant. Mamdani won the votes of over one million New Yorkers for the first time since the mayoral election in 1969 when liberal mayoral candidate John Linsday won more than one million votes.

At first bush Mamdani and Lindsay have little else in common. Lindsay was from a wealthy New York family, a kind of “Brahman” Protestant from West End Avenue descended from English and Dutsch stock. Mandani is a Muslim born in Uganda to a postcolonial scholar and a film maker from India. Lindsay was a classic liberal and Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist. So, at first blush the only thing that brings them together is that they both received one million voters in New York City.

But there is something else, and this is where it gets interesting for me. Both were accused of antisemitism by a segment of New York Jewry. Lindsay because of his support of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville New York City School Strike in 1968, and Mamdani because of his anti-Zionism and harsh critique of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. As I will argue below, the glue that holds all this together is the militant rabbi Meir Kahane circa 1968, and what I am calling the specter of Kahanism in and what I am calling the specter of Kahanism in 2025.

This story begins with a short comment I made on the Facebook thread of an ex-colleague. After Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove’s sermon accusing Mamdani of being a “danger to the security of New York Jews” and then the “Rabbis Letter” of over 1000 rabbis supporting this view, even quoting him in the letter, this ex-colleague, part of a liberal Jewish organization, posted a series of bullet points supporting Rabbi Cosgrove’s position.

In a comment I wrote, perhaps too obliquely, “I guess we’re ‘All Kahanists Now’!” I didn’t explain my play on words. I was riffing on a comment Commentary Magazine editor Norman Podhoretz made in the early 1970s “We’re all Zionists Now.” What Podhoretz meant was that after the Six-Day War in 1967 the remaining ambivalence of some American Jews toward Zionism was washed away with the tide of both relief and triumphalism of the Six-Day War.

While I assume most readers did not catch that reference, the response by my ex-colleague and many of her readers was swift and unambiguous, a combination of incredulity, righteous indignation, and overt anger. “How dare you call x a Kahanist!” kind of captured the sentiment, most not only attacking my comment but defending the original post. I tried to explain what I meant, that I wasn’t accusing anyone of overt racism or advocating violence but rather noting, as I said, “Kahane would agree with every single sentence in the original post.” The criticism continued.

I re-visit that unfortunate but also illustrative Facebook moment because I think the passing Lindsay reference on election night offers me an opportunity to sharpen what I meant and explain in greater detail about what I describe as the specter of Kahanism in our time. In fact, this specter was what drew me to write a book about Kahane in the first place back in the “before times” (Walt Whitman’s locution of the day before the Civil War) of the late teens of the 21^st century.

Kahane’s attack on Lindsay was different in degree but not in kind from Cosgrove’s sermon and the “Rabbis Letter” attack on Mamdani. That is, Lindsay’s support of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school strike in 1968 and his sympathy for the Black population in New York was deemed by Kahane as antisemitic. In Kahane’s mind the problem was not progressivism but liberalism, which has its own irony given that today it is many liberal Jews who claim the problem is not liberalism, but progressivism. Below I reproduce a page from my book Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical to set the context of my remarks regarding the connection between Lindsay and Mamdani, taken from pages 88-89.

The Ocean Hill–Brownsville strike in Brooklyn in the spring of 1968 was a watershed moment for race relations in New York City and generated numerous book- length studies and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of articles and essays. None of these studies, however, make any mention of Meir Kahane or the JDL. Kahane took action in response to one aspect of the strike: the anti- Semitic rhetoric of some of its organizers such as Sonny Carson, Rhody McCoy, Leslie Campbell, and others, including some of the parents of the children in the school district. It should be noted here that Kahane was a local political animal at this time and a voracious reader of the New York City–area press. His interests were driven by local issues including the mayoral campaign of John Lindsay, Leonard and Felicia Bern stein’s parlor meeting for the Black Panthers in May 1970, black militancy on college campuses in the area (e.g., Brooklyn College), and patrolling inner- city neighborhoods to protect elderly Jews.

The Ocean Hill–Brownsville case was perhaps the most volatile example of an amalgamation of issues that came to fruition in the late 1960s. The Ford Foundation helped set up three experimental school districts, of which Ocean Hill–Brownsville was one, that would try out decentralization and community control of the public schools in an attempt to grant parents in ethnic- minority communities more control of their children’s education. Community control in the public schools was “a mass- based, grassroots campaign, one that helped stimulate the less visible and more enduring black in de pen dent school movement of the 1960s and ’70s.” The black community was trying to give its young an alternative to inferior schools and an education that did not prepare them for the realities of the world. Kahane was convinced that this decentralization project would lead to the expansion of Black Power and black separatism and to increased hatred of Jews and whites more generally. In his view it would teach revenge: “What will happen is that schools will produce children taught to hate the white man so that robbery, looting, rape and murder will be looked upon not as evil but as legitimate means of revenging oneself on ‘oppressors.’ ” The legitimate claims of blacks became for Kahane a mere excuse for antiwhite and anti- Semitic hatred. That was why he so adamantly opposed this policy into the early 1970s, by which time most Jewish children in New York City public schools were no longer attending troubled schools like those in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. By the late 1960s majority- black New York City public school districts like Ocean Hill–Brownsville were receiving far fewer resources than white districts. At the same time, many of the public-school teachers in these mostly black and Hispanic districts were white— and many of these white teachers were Jews, a legacy of the large entry of New York–area Jews into the public[1]education field in the 1960s, many having benefited from the GI Bill. Albert Shanker, who, as mentioned earlier, had taken an active role in the civil rights movement in the south, was president of the UFT (United Federation of Teachers) and a major player in the debate over the decentralizing protect for the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district that began in July 1967. Shanker opposed decentralization because he felt it threatened the autonomy of the teachers in his organization. Opposing Shanker was an African American educational administrator named Rhody McCoy, a Howard University graduate who had spent almost twenty years in public education and had served as principal in various schools. He was not a radical militant; he took the job “ because he saw it as a way to do something about the educational catastrophe he saw developing in the city’s black community.” On May 9, 1968, a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King, McCoy and the local board sent out notifications to thirteen teachers, five assistant principals, and one principal in the Ocean Hill– Brownsville district that their contracts were terminated, effective immediately. The letters stated that they should report to the headquarters of the New York City schools for reassignment. The governing board, or at least McCoy, wanted to replace these teachers and administrators as part of its attempt to revamp the district and its curriculum. It is significant that the replacements appointed by McCoy included whites, both Jews and gentiles, as well as African Americans. Shanker rejected McCoy’s terminations and instructed his teachers to report for work as usual. The teachers and administrators tried to enter the schools but were stopped by protesting parents and community members. At Shanker’s request, Mayor Lindsay provided a police escort for the teachers who successfully entered the schools. In protest, the local board closed all the schools in its district; Shanker and the UFT responded by pulling out all of its 350 members in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, prompting a massive strike that would last to the end of the school year.55 Shanker, a veteran administrator and a liberal white Jew, and McCoy, a powerful African American educator, brought the New York City public school system, one of the largest in the country, to a screeching halt.

Kahane was living in the midst of Black nationalism initially instituted by Stokley Carmichael in June 1966, and he focused on the antisemitic rhetoric of some PTA parents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district, which was over 90% Black and Hispanic, while the teachers were 80% white (including many Jews). Kahane claimed Lindsay was supporting or at least enabling the antisemitism that arose in light of the school strike.

(Stokley Carmichael)

In Kahane’s case, and here I suggest reading my chapter on race in the book, the underlying assumption in Kahane’s thinking was that Blacks held antisemitic views and that the school strike was simply an occasion to express them. Setting this aside for the moment, his attack on Lindsay suggested that a NYC mayor, in this case a High-Church white Protestant would throw Jews “under the bus” if he needed to maintain his liberal values. Interesting, Israel was not at issue here at all and wouldn’t be for Kahane until 1972 when he published Time to Go Home, his swansong to America. In his congressional testimony in 1967 on Soviet Jewry he does deal with the PLO somewhat, but it is not his central issue there. Later it would become his main concern. Underlying Kahane’s worldview is that America is not safe for Jews and that America will ultimately turn on Jews in line with the Jewish past.

The context of 2025 is different and yet oddly similar. Now Israel is the central issue. October 7 and the Gaza War which led to the utter destruction of Gaza evoked large protests in the progressive camp that was not viewed as threatening the liberal Jewish camp. Liberal Jews continue to struggle to make sense of, and defend, the death and destruction of Gaza and yet maintain their fidelity to Israel, viewing claims of “genocide” as indicative of antisemitism not dissimilar to the ways many Black parents blamed Jews for taking over their school district (some numbers suggested 70% of white teachers in the district were Jews).

Enter Mamdani (from central casting), a Muslim, socialist, anti-Zionist candidate for mayor who expressed many of the sentiments of the campus protestors, albeit he had no record of animus toward Jews. But by 2025 American Jewish identity and Israel had become so fused (which was not the case in 1968) that anti-Israel sentiment was tacitly viewed as antisemitic. Any claim otherwise was rejected as naïve.

The antisemitism of the late 1960s was largely viewed as existing in the white nationalist camp (e.g. The John Birch Society and the remnants of the Klan) and Black nationalism, whereas in 2025 it was viewed as embedded in the pro-Palestinian Solidarity movement, with Charlottesville, Pittsburgh etc. on the sidelines. In fact, Orthodox Jewry had been moving closer to the white Christian evangelical camp, which had become more pro-Israel (albeit also arguably antisemitic) since the rise of neoconservatism in the 1970s and the Reagan era 1980s but accelerated after the rise of Islamophobia in the wake of 9/11.

If one listens to rabbis Cosgrove and Buchdahl and read the “Rabbis Letter” onc can hear the resonance of Kahane’s anxiety in 1968. Three examples will suffice. Cosgrove’s language that Mamdani is a “danger to the security of Jews in NYC”; Buchdahl’s comment that if Mamdani is elected all of New York may become like the campus at Columbia University (referring to the student protests there); and Donniel Hartman and Yossi Halevi’s Hartman podcast where Mamdani’s election and popularity was described as “Hurban New York.” [the destruction of NY Jewry]. It is worth noting that Halevi was a follower of Kahane and wrote a column in the JDL Newsletter in the late 1960s and early 1970s and in many ways his locution echoes the sentiment of hos former teacher.

This all fed into the Facebook post I mentioned above. These comments to my mind reflect the sentiment of a specter of Kahanism in the sense that (now) progressivism is antisemitic at its core and a danger to the Jews. In Kahane’s time it was liberalism but remember the liberalism of the late 1960s was part of the last phases of the New Left.

The vitriol of “how I dare accuse anyone of Kahanism” is because I think the name has become tied to the militarism and racist polices of Kahane in Israel. But that is a different Kahanism than the Kahanism of the late 1960s when in the early 1970s Life Magazine did a story on the JDL noting that 25% of American Jews had positive feelings about it. The Kahanism of which I speak is that American liberalism, now progressivism, holds animus against Jews and given power will invariably exercise antisemitism. In Kahane’s time it was centered in Black nationalism and today in pro-Palestinian solidarity. In Kahane’s time it was the antisemitic sentiment in some of the Black ghettos (see James Baldwin’s 1967 essay about Harlem “Blacks are Antisemitic because They’re Anti-White”). Today it is the antisemitic sentiment in some voices in the campus protests against the Gaza War. In both cases, the precarity of Jews, the fact that Jews need to be “afraid,” the notion that they are “unsafe” in the streets on NYC and an “enemy on the left” more generally is something that one can see in Kahane’s 1968 rhetoric and the rhetoric of many liberal Jews today.

Today’s Jewish progressives, many of whom voted for Mamdani, are the incarnation in a different context of the radical Jews of the early 1970s. Arthur Waskow z”l referred to them as moving “from Jewish radicals to radical Jews” in his 1971 book The Bush is Burning. One difference is that many of the radical Jews of the early 1970s still maintained some form of Zionism, as they lived in the aftermath of the Six Day War, whereas many progressive Jews in 2025 have liberated themselves from Zionism in part the result of the Gaza War.

Calling Jews to “leave NYC” or “leave America for Israel” was as ubiquitous in the late 1960s as it is today. Kahane’s 1972 book Time to Go Home was all about that, its central thesis being that America has been better to the Jews than any civilization in history and yet even its democracy and freedom will not, cannot, ultimately protect Jews against the dangers of antisemitism. Jews didn’t leave en mass from NYC in 1968, albeit Aliyah increased because of the Six Day War, and I don’t think Jews will leave en mass in Mamdani’s New York in 2025. In addition. Lindsay didn’t turn out to be antisemitic, and I don’t think Mamdani’s is either.

What is striking to me is the rhetoric of fear in both cases, predictions of the end of New York Jewry, not made now by radical right-wing Jewish militants like Kahane, but by liberal rabbis and pundits. To me this indicates that a Kahanist perspective of precarity and fragility remains, even among New York Jews who are one of the most well-integrated and successful minorities in the US. With the help of the ADL, this precarity and fear is becoming mainstreamed.

Today, the entire story is focused almost exclusively on Israel. Many American Jews can no longer view their Jewishness outside the Jewish state they choose not to live in. And they sometimes even question the “Jewishness” of others who reject that fidelity as a prerequisite of being a “member of the tribe.” (see Gol Troy and Natan Sharansky’s essay “Un Jew” in Tablet Magazine in 2021). I do not discount the sentiment of those for whom Israel is central to their identity for whatever reason. I challenge however those how make that a pre-requisite for others

The decision of Israel to utterly obliterate Gaza; to my mind, a choice not a necessity, has created a new template for Kahanism in America to emerge, not to advocate militarism but to instill fear in Jews that, as Kahane predicted inn 1972, America will eventually turn against its Jews. My short interchange on that Facebook page made me realize that even to make that claim and call it by a name (“Kahanism”) is to commit treason against Jewish liberalism, even as it is Jewish liberalism that is, in fact, making that claim.