Against the Politics of Communal Fear By Bhaskar SunkaraNew York City’s new municipal strategy to combat antisemitism comes just days after the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu used his platform at the United Nations to call Zohran Mamdani “the antisemitic mayor of New York” and claim that since his election “many Jews no longer feel safe” in the city. The initiative seeks to expand education, support victims of hate crimes, and fund security at Jewish institutions and other houses of worship throughout the five boroughs. Laudable as any attempt to reduce animus is, the Left should view the plan skeptically. Antisemitism, it goes without saying, is an evil. And it’s an evil that socialists have particular reason to be concerned with. For centuries, the idea that powerful Jewish interests were at the heart of social injustice was widespread. Socialists of August Bebel’s generation called antisemitism “the socialism of fools” for how it steered resentment of capitalist instability and speculation into ethnic hatred. Today Mamdani is right to condemn it. And it is understandable that he wants to give that condemnation a practical policy expression. This makes sense on the level of both principle and tactics for a political leader who has been the subject of a deliberate and baseless attempt to equate his support for Palestinian freedom with antisemitism. Any socialist mayor should oppose prejudice, enforce equal rights, and respond to specific acts of discrimination or violence. The question is whether the administration’s response is proportionate to the problem, and whether its rhetoric helps people assess their circumstances accurately or encourages them to understand their lives through a sense of communal siege.
https://jacobin.com/2026/10/antisemitism-communal-identity-mamdani-universalism Why Russia remains stubbornly insignificant to the Middle East Support for Palestinian statehood has been Moscow's position since the Soviet Union backed partition in 1947, and it has remained so since the Russian Federation's establishment in December 1991. Rather than providing the Palestinians with substantial support against their Israeli colonisers, the Russian Federation has, since 1991, at best offered nothing more than empty diplomatic rhetoric in supp
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