Mass Immigration Is Fueling Antisemitism
New York offers a warning: mass immigration without assimilation is reshaping America’s attitudes toward Israel—and Jews.
[Last week], Zohran Mamdani released a video calling Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and declaring that the Israeli prime minister is “not welcome” in New York City. Mamdani campaigned on a pledge to have the NYPD arrest Netanyahu under the ICC’s warrant, though he has since acknowledged that he lacks the legal authority to do so. The pledge is consistent with Mamdani’s political approach to Israel. As a state legislator, he supported the BDS movement, , and during his campaign for mayor, refused for weeks to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.” Mamdani has taken every possible opportunity to attack Israel publicly and to sympathize with its opponents.
Mamdani’s loathing of Israel is striking, especially in context. New York is the historic capital of the Jewish diaspora and home to more Jews than any city outside of Israel. How did New York—the city of Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg—elect Mamdani? There are obvious, familiar answers. New York City is deep blue; socialism is increasingly fashionable among the young; Mamdani ran on rent freezes and free buses, and many of his voters cared more about affordability than Gaza.
But the deeper answer is demographic. In 1970, fewer than one in five New Yorkers was foreign-born. Today, it’s more than one in three. New York’s Muslim population has grown from an estimated 768,000 in 2016 to approximately one million today; by some estimates, Muslims in the city now outnumber Jews. Since 2010, New York’s Bangladeshi-born population has nearly doubled, as have its Ghanaian- and Uzbek-born populations; its African-born population has increased by 50%. The Washington Post described Muslims and immigrants as the backbone of Mamdani’s coalition. Nine in ten Muslim voters backed Mamdani for mayor, and seven in ten New Yorkers said that the candidates’ positions on Israel factored into their vote. Mamdani did not become mayor of New York despite the city’s religious and ethnic makeup; he became the mayor because of it.
Immigrants are not blank slates. When they immigrate, they bring their culture—their language, food, music, worldview, religion, and loyalties—with them. Assimilation is not automatic: either they make a point of assimilating , or their new country requires it of them. The United States has welcomed millions of immigrants over the last decade while setting no standards whatsoever for assimilation. As a result, there is a growing population in this country of people with no love for our laws or our way of life, and no loyalty to our allies.
Loyalty to Israel is a distinctively American commitment. The United States has historically been the Jewish state’s fiercest defender on the world stage. That loyalty is the product of a particular culture. Protestant, biblically literate America saw itself in Israel’s story from the beginning: the Puritans crossed the Atlantic as a new Israel fleeing Pharaoh. President Truman recognized the Jewish state eleven minutes after its birth, over his own State Department’s objections. When a friend later introduced him as the man who helped create Israel, Truman corrected him: “What do you mean, ‘helped to create’? I am Cyrus.” No other nation shares this history. Most of the world is indifferent to Israel, and most of the Muslim world is Israel’s sworn enemy. When an immigrant comes to the United States from Dhaka or Accra or Tashkent, he does not arrive with Truman’s biblical imagination, and nothing in American life today would instill it.
There is another confounding factor at work here. Despite all the domestic hand-wringing about systemic racism, modern Westerners are remarkably un-tribal. If you grow up in the United States or Western Europe today, you are taught from a young age never to condemn anyone because of his race or faith. This is a distinctive moral commitment, downstream of the West’s Christian heritage. Christianity teaches that every person is made in the image of God, and that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. This is neither an obvious nor a universally held belief. Throughout much of the rest of the world, caste systems and tribal grudges remain an accepted part of life. I came from an intensely tribal society: the Somali clan system. Where I grew up, discriminating in favor of your clan and against the others was as strongly enjoined as nondiscrimination is in the West. When people from these societies move to the West, they bring with them their beliefs about tribal loyalty, and natural ethnic or racial hierarchy.