When ‘Universal’ Has Exceptions: A Jewish Reading of Zohran Mamdani’s Message
Rabbi David Gedzelman opens with a bracing idea from Bernard-Henri Lévy: The real fight inside “universalism” is between a version that makes room for particular identities and a version that demands they disappear. That lens, he argues, is useful for hearing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural line that Palestinians in Bay Ridge will no longer face a politics that preaches universalism while making them “the exception.”
Gedzelman isn’t persuaded; he’s perplexed. He asks what, concretely, is being denied to Palestinian New Yorkers in local politics—and what, exactly, Mamdani is promising roughly 9,000 Palestinians in Bay Ridge that he is not also promising roughly 19,000 Jewish neighbors. If the claim is about speech, he says Palestinian identity is rarely challenged unless it slides into negating Jewish or Israeli affirmation, citing chants such as “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” at protests in heavily Jewish areas.
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From there, he examines Mamdani’s campaign posture: opposing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state on the grounds that no state should define itself through racial or religious hierarchy, while, he argues, showing no similar alarm about other religiously defined polities. A core critique follows: Mamdani, in his telling, forces Jewish identity into a “race or religion” box, ignoring Jewish peoplehood as a multiracial national-and-religious identity shaped by lineage and conversion—“an extended family with an open adoption policy.”
He then turns to allies like Peter Beinart and Brad Lander and disputes the premise that Jewish sovereignty must equal supremacy. A counterpoint from Rabbi Jill Jacobs is presented: Many nation-states are ethnostates, and minority rights matter; the US model is not the norm.
Gedzelman closes by warning that Jews risk being pushed into a “hide your particularism” universalism in city politics. Read Rabbi Gedzelman’s opinion piece for the argument in full.
