What Mamdani Assumes About Judaism
Reduce Judaism to religion only and Jewish peoplehood disappears. That's the point. It's antisemitism, fluent in the language of universal rights
The most revealing moment in Zohran Mamdani’s recent interview to ABC was not what he said about Israel. It was what he assumed about Judaism.
Asked whether he supported Israel as a Jewish state, Mamdani replied:
“I support the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”
“But as a Jewish state is the question,” the interviewer pressed.
“I think any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”
The exchange came only after Mamdani had effectively declined to endorse the traditional Democratic Party position of two states for two peoples.
His answer was based on a premise: that Judaism is merely a religion. If that is true, then describing Israel as a “Jewish state” necessarily means describing it as a state that privileges one religion over others. From there, Mamdani adopts the posture of universal principle: he opposes any state that grants one religion a preferred status.
The premise itself is false.
First, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study, more than one-fifth of the world’s countries maintain an official or preferred religion. Many of them are prosperous liberal democracies, including Denmark and the United Kingdom.
The issue is not whether established religions are compatible with democracy. The real issue is that Mamdani’s argument assumes that Judaism is only a religion.
That leaves only two possibilities. Either he knows very little about Judaism — an astonishing level of ignorance for the mayor of New York —or his hostility toward Israel has blinded him to one of the most elementary historical facts about the Jewish people.
Judaism is both a religion and a nation. For thousands of years, Jews have understood themselves as a people with a shared history, a common language, collective institutions, diverse religious traditions, and — crucially — a homeland from which they originated. Long before modern nationalism, the Jewish people built communities, preserved a civilization, and maintained an identity that survived without sovereignty.
This distinction matters because reducing Judaism to a religion strips Jews of collective rights.
If Jews are only adherents of a faith, then they possess no greater claim to national self-determination than Buddhists or Methodists. The legitimacy of Jewish nationhood disappears by definition. This is why redefining Judaism as only a religion has so often accompanied efforts to deny the legitimacy of Jewish national existence.
Individual Jews are, of course, free to define their own identity however they choose. Some see themselves primarily or exclusively through a religious lens. That is their right. But when politicians occupying positions of extraordinary public authority — in this case, the mayor of New York City — attempt to impose that definition on the Jewish people as a whole, they are not making an academic observation. They are attacking the identity of a minority.
Mamdani’s formulation is not new. It belongs to a long intellectual tradition that sought to dismantle Jewish peoplehood.
Perhaps the clearest example came during the French Revolution. In December 1789, Count Clermont-Tonnerre argued passionately for granting Jews equal civil rights—but only on one condition:
“We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals... They must be citizens individually... It is repugnant to have in the state... a nation within the nation.”
His intentions were likely more benevolent than Mamdani’s. Yet his demand was unmistakable: Jews could enjoy equality only if they abandoned their collective national identity.
Clermont-Tonnerre’s words reveal exactly what both Jews and their neighbors understood Judaism to be centuries ago — not only a religion, but a people.
The American tradition took a profoundly different path.
When President George Washington wrote his famous letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, he did not require Jews to surrender their collective identity in exchange for equal citizenship. On the contrary, he addressed them precisely as a distinct people:
“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Washington fortified something fundamental about the American experiment: equal citizenship does not require minorities to erase who they are.
That is precisely what Mamdani’s argument attempts to undo. His anti-Zionism is so rabid that it forces him to reduce the Jewish identity, to dilute it, to empty it of every collective trait. His next interviewer should ask a simpler question: Do you acknowledge that the Jews are a people, with ancestry tracing back to Judea? Then watch what happens.
Washington promised the children of Abraham that none would make them afraid. That is the American tradition Mamdani is asking New York to forget.
I find it really interesting that Jew-haters think they can define what is Judaism and who are the Jewish People. Not once did the interviewer push back against Mamdani. Just accepted his version of who and what are the Jewish People.
I still can’t wrap my head around how many smart people and Jewish people support this man