Mark Halperin recently wrote on X: “There is a lot of antisemitism in America, but you know what there is substantially more of? Tolerance of antisemitism.”

That simple truth has stuck with me, especially because so much of that tolerance emanates from the very people who consider themselves beyond reproach on questions of prejudice: the left. How did a political movement that preaches the sanctity of lived experience and the urgency of anti-racism become so intolerant of Jews? As the left’s political power has grown, the box for acceptable expressions of Jewish identity keeps shrinking.

Screenshot/@NYCMayor/X

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (left) at T'ruah's gala at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City, June 2, 2026.

Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani met with a carefully curated group of rabbis. It is fitting that he chose rabbis as the emissaries of New York’s Jewish community, since his worldview seems to allow for Judaism, a religion, but not for Jews, a people.

What should outrage us most is our own community’s tolerance of this ostracism. There is no acceptable way for any rabbi to break bread with an elected leader who is deliberately deciding which members of the Jewish community matter. Being a rabbi does not simply mean you can read Hebrew or chant Torah. It is supposed to mean you are a teacher of Jewish law, Jewish text, Jewish life cycle events and Jewish heritage. Rabbis traditionally have been fierce protectors of the Jewish people and advocates for justice on their behalf.

This kind of thinking goes beyond boycotting a parade or calling for a day of rage to protest a visit from Israel’s democratically elected leader, whoever that leader happens to be. By excluding rabbis he deems too “Zionist,” too conservative or who have consistently pointed out his hypocrisy from the conversation, Mamdani is telling his millions of followers which Jews, for now, deserve respect and engagement. It’s telling that this meeting included no representative of Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement famously open to and engaged with the wider world, including non-Orthodox Jews, and significant that he arranged a separate meeting the week before with representatives of the notoriously insular and self-serving Satmar. He is setting an intentional example of exclusion and building a permission structure for it.

So spare me the argument that our rabbis must “negotiate” with Mamdani in order to “protect” our community. 

No rabbi is doing us any favors by choosing to be a part of any gathering that implicitly offers a blessing to Mamdani’s segregation of our community, or his attempt to redefine what a Jew is and who gets to speak for us. 

Mamdani is not an aberration, either. Across the country, candidates of the left are running campaigns and winning races built on vilifying Israel and trafficking in modern-day blood libels. This is the reframing Mamdani and the far left are after: Jews may exist as a religion, practiced quietly and privately, but not as a people with a shared history and a homeland. This is the model he and others on the left are trying to establish: Be Jewish behind closed doors, disclaim the majority of your people, and you may be tolerated. It’s why his condemnations of antisemitism when it manifests in violence like the Upper West Side stabbing on Tisha B’av outside The Jewish Center in July and Friday night’s incident at Central Synagogue on the Upper East Side ring so hollow. He treats our community as though we should appreciate him turning up with a garden hose to a four-alarm fire — one onto which he continues to pour gasoline.

But we have been here before, and we know how to fight back. 

In 1975, the United Nations, driven by the Soviet Union, declared that “Zionism is racism,” and American Jews did not plead for meetings or grovel for reassurance by UN leadership that they didn’t actually mean it and Zionism wasn’t actually racism. No. American Jews stood up: united, proud and unafraid. 

In many ways, today, Jews have missed the mark completely regarding who we need on our side. We have overlooked who our actual allies are. Often they are non-Jews who are sticking their necks out, refusing to accept the lies and smears thrown at our community by people like Mamdani. Yet, too many of our community leaders would rather beg for a seat at Mamdani’s cool kids table than offer more than a public acknowledgement or thank you for the Ritchie Torres’, Haley Stevens’, Wesley Bell’s, Wes Moore’s, Tony Evers’, Laura Gillen’s and Tom Suozzi’s of the world. These leaders are our allies. Yet, we continue to seek acceptance in all the wrong places. Mamdani and the far left do not care about Jews, what we think, or who we are unless it fits their narrative.

Halperin is right about how tolerance is now the issue, not the antisemitism itself. The answer is not to plead our way into rooms that hold our peoplehood up for debate. It is time for Jews to retire the idea that we must belong where we aren’t wanted. It’s time we think about ourselves and stand with those who actually stand with us. Our religion is Judaism, but we are the Jews. No leader, no matter how charismatic, gets to decide otherwise.

Sara Forman, who recently joined Optimistic Labs as a senior advisor and is the author of the Substack Shtetl & State, has worked in Democratic Party politics for over 20 years and is the former executive director of the New York Solidarity Network.