Mamdani’s Judeo-Bolshevik Threat

On Islamophobia, Demographics, and Radical Politics

Benjamin Balthaser

August 1, 2025

Enzo Traverso made the observation that Islamophobia has taken on many of the features of classic antisemitism.¹ Unlike other racial or cultural antagonisms produced through capitalism, the figure of the Jew has been predominantly imagined neither as a racialized slave nor colonized subject, so much as an enemy within. In the classic far-right imaginary, the Jew simultaneously brings a destructive and unassimilable culture into the heart of the West, while also, like a doppelganger, mimicking the victim they intend to destroy. As the colonized subject might be dehumanized with simian features, the Jew in late nineteenth century Europe was metamorphized into an undead or vampiric shapeshifter, even more deadly for this ability—in short, a civilized monstrosity. In Yuri Slezkine’s allegorical binary, Jews were imagined with the Mercurial fluidity of modernity—literate, urban, associated with the fungibility of money—as opposed to the Apollonian nationality of warriors and farmers: Hollywood one could say, versus the Heartland. While Zohran Mamdani may hypostasize to the Democratic and Republican leadership a dangerous racialized radicalism, his representation also borrows many of these traits from the antisemitic imagery of the early twentieth century.

In a series of campaign images and news stories shortly before and after Mamdani’s victory, the racialization of Mamdani’s religious identification as a Muslim was impossible to miss. An ad released by a “pro-Cuomo super PAC” was captioned Mamdani “Reject[s]” the quartet of “the N.Y.P.D.,” “Israel,” “Capitalism,” and “Jewish Rights.”² The ad urges us to understand that Mamdani is simultaneously the enemy of Western property and order—the police and capitalism—while also threatening liberal rights guaranteed by modern states. If this didn’t already sound like post-911 rhetoric pointing to the “Islamic Jihadist,” who hated the West for both its imperialism and its liberal freedoms, the darkened portrait of Mamdani in the far-left corner with an exaggerated beard would not so gently nudge the viewer in this direction. In another one of many images in which Mamdani was literally “darkened,” such as in the New York Post’s editorial board warning of a “dangerous socialist” who has led “Democrats astray,” this Mamdani—with a fuller beard, deep circles around his eyes, and a skin tone several shades darker than his own—is designed to convey the menace of Blackness.

Campaign mailer from pro-Cuomo super PAC Fix the City featuring a darkened Mamdani with an artificially enhanced beard.

Of course the idea of Islam as a particular civilizational threat to the Christian West has a long history, dating back to the Crusades and to the Spanish conquest of al-Andalus in the late fifteenth century. In the US context the formal development of Islamophobia dovetailed with the postwar US imperial engagement in the Middle East, culminating with the War on Terror and the post-9/11 security state. The figure of the “Jihadist” was invented by lurid CNN tales of terror as well as by Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and Walter Laqueur. According to Lewis and Laqueur, the “Muslim,” was “humiliated” by the United States’s colonial domination of the Middle East and translated such humiliation into a paranoid, irrational hatred of Israel. This is the cultural theory behind the supposed “new antisemitism,” as the US empire thus became not only a bulwark of civilization against “terrorists,” but also the protector of the Jews and the defender of minority rights. While it may seem strange to pose the nuclear-armed, highly militarized nation-state of Israel as a vulnerable “minority,” Israel becomes the “collective Jew”—the Anne Frank in the attic, who must be defended by the United States against the stormtrooping “Islamofascist” threat of Hamas or Al-Qaeda.

While such civilizational binaries may seem absurd and simplistic, they nevertheless have had dramatic impact on the United States, and in no greater place than New York City. As scholar Khaled Beydoun notes in American Islamophobia, the War on Terror did not single out only “rogue states,” but rather a racialized concept of “terror” in which any Muslim may be a member of a sleeper cell—a secret agent lurking in the interstices of liberal US democracy.³ The consequences of such a construction have been profound: nearly every mosque in the city was put under surveillance by the NYPD; hundreds of Muslims were rounded up and imprisoned without charge in the days after the attack; scores of Muslim men have been entrapped in “fishing expeditions” by overzealous FBI agents; and hate crimes, including violence and countless arson attacks against mosques, have been the norm. There were even news stories and social media posts declaring that Mamdani would declare “sharia law” in New York City and none other than the President of the United States called for his deportation.⁴ The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) logged in nearly seven thousand Islamophobic social media posts about Mamdani, generating tens of millions of views and engagements.⁵ While socialist politicians such as Jamaal Bowman or Bernie Sanders have certainly incurred the wrath of the ruling class, neither have been subjected to such vitriol or calls for state violence.

The charge that wraps around Mamdani with the sharpest barb is that he is an antisemite. Based in part on Mamdani’s claim that he is an “anti-Zionist” and his defense of both the right to say and the sentiment behind “globalize the intifada,” there has been a torrent of articles that take Mamdani’s antisemitism as a matter of settled record. Major figures in the liberal and Democratic establishment—including Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz, Reverend Al Sharpton, New York senator Kristen Gillibrand, and New York Congressman Ritchie Torres—have denounced Mamdani; liberal talk show host Stephen Colbert grilled the candidate on the question, easily the longest part of the interview.⁶ Nearly every major news outlet has run a story taking the claim seriously. The irony of course is that Mamdani has never evinced antisemitic sentiments and has significant Jewish support, while both Cuomo and Adams have been known to make antisemitic comments and associate with known antisemites—and yet neither have been questioned for their views.⁷ As Jewish mayoral candidate Brad Lander has also pointed out, he is seldom questioned for his own criticisms of Israel.

This fusion, between antisemitic conspiracy theory and Islamophobic racism suggests more than simply the cranial soup of fascist thought, but a kind of structural homology—a racial formation to explain widening contradictions of both capitalism and the political conjuncture.

Social media has been particularly virulent, with fears that Jewish neighborhoods will be under threat and that Mamdani would unleash violent attacks on Jews in their own city. Social media influencers such as Briana Wu have likened Mamdani’s victory to an impending Holocaust. As Zionist social media celebrity Blake Flayton urged Jews to leave NYC for Israel, he tweeted Jews “built New York” into “something spectacular,” and have been “repaid” by “antisemitism.”⁸ It is a curious construction, as it suggests that Jews are a force of civilization and progress that a Muslim radical has come to ruin: it is not only that Jews need to be protected from Muslims by the American empire, Jews in Flayton’s mind are Western civilization. Mamdani’s “jihadism” and his “antisemitism” are products not of his politics, which have never evinced either, but his identity.⁹ They are true because of who he is, just as Cuomo’s actual antisemitic comments are ignored. In a civilizational war, antisemitism is something Muslims, not Christians, are preternaturally guilty of.

Mamdani’s visage has been clearly whitened in this image featured in the *New York Post*.

Yet, even as Mamdani was figuratively and literally “darkened” by the press and his political opponents, another more recent “scandal” erupted in which Mamdani is reported to have claimed he was “African American” in his application to Columbia University. While the exact truth of both the charge and the report’s source remains under question, the story touched a nerve, especially after a series of high profile academics have falsely claimed either African American or Native American identity, presumably out of a libidinal form of appropriation or the base calculation that they may benefit from affirmative action. In two news stories run by the New York Post, Mamdani’s face is whitened rather than darkened, with one of headlines punning “Everything Will be all White.” Mamdani is no longer a racial threat from the global South, but is revealed to be an emergent Anglo-Saxon whose whiteness is dangerous precisely because he can skillfully perform an authenticating darkness. Suddenly Mamdani’s Otherness is not the problem; it is his lack of Otherness—he is a Mercurial shape-shifter opposed to the Apollonian citizen with a stable racial identity.

From Islamic Radical to Judeo-Bolshevik

If this is beginning to sound like the Judeo-Bolshevik threat—in which Jews are simultaneously Orientalized devils sitting on mounds of skulls and passing well enough for white to run Europe’s finance—it is because it does.¹⁰ While Traverso has gone further to suggest that Islamophobia has overtaken antisemitism, his analysis refuses to consider the ways in which both discourses simultaneously co-constitute one another while also appearing as their opposite. Indeed, in one of the more revealing right wing attacks in recent weeks, Fox News accused Mamdani of receiving funding from George Soros, the billionaire investor who fuses the “Judeo-Bolshevik” with the “Jewish financier” into a single image: Soros simultaneously can support socialist subversion and racial miscegenation around the world, all from his secret mansion in New York City.¹¹ Soros is credited with running a kind of “shadow” or “crypto” state, influencing world events from migrant caravans to legal cases against Donald Trump and now, apparently, antisemitic left-wing mayoral candidates. This fusion, between antisemitic conspiracy theory and Islamophobic racism suggests more than simply the cranial soup of fascist thought, but a kind of structural homology—a racial formation to explain widening contradictions of both capitalism and the political conjuncture.

Anti-Bolshevik propaganda poster (1919) depicting Leon Trotsky as a devil.

As Stuart Hall reminds us, socially produced identities are not only unstable, their instability is as much about the qualities of individuals as a “point of departure” to understand the forces of capitalism, social movements, and states that produced them.¹² Writing in the 1990s, Hall argues that “the great collective social identities…which could be spoken about as if they were singular actors in their own right” have fragmented and given way “amid new globals and new locals” of accumulation, empire, migration, and state formation.¹³ Fascism is now a hemispheric phenomenon and is rising in the Latin and Global South.¹⁴ Stable markers such as “class” and “gender” have given way to competing processes, shifts in loyalties and alignments, changing identities. The sight of Black Proud Boys, Latinos for Trump, or conversely, organized Jewish communities against Zionism, the election of trans men and women to office suggest—for worse and for better—that major and dramatic changes are afoot in the “imperatives of the individual self” and the “collective social identities” through which we are to narrate the brief arc of our lives and the long arc of histories.¹⁵

Hall’s perspectives on identity at least in part emerge from his own transformations, from a Jamaican immigrant in London who understood the world primarily in class terms to being swept up the Black freedom struggle of late 1960s as the castaways of Britain’s empire had literally and figuratively come home to roost. Bringing his insights of class and race to readings of Marx, Hall took a page from Gramsci to comprehend not only how states align segments of the working class to various political projects, but also how they align and reshape identities as part of a broad “ideological complex…..or discursive formation.” Old identities and ideologies are reformed into a part of the future; seemingly submerged or disappeared ideologies and identities suddenly form the basis of a new realignment of power. In this way we can see the shifting, seemingly contradictory discourses refracting from Mamdani as not only the product of his racialization, but rather the inverse—that is, how Islamophobia and antisemitism are means to narrate a fracturing political, cultural and economic sureties.

Race of an Electoral Race

New York City is one of the most predictable of American electorates; symbolically one could say, New York City has been a stable terrain of urban referents: Gotham, or the metropolis of America. The city has voted reliably Democratic in presidential elections since before FDR remade the electoral map; it has also been a cosmopolitan and, at many times, conflicted center of mass migratory waves from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, China, the Caribbean, the US South, and, more recently, from South America and South Asia. And yet a closer look reveals such sureties are on a path to dissolution. There were many widely reported stories of blue collar, immigrant neighborhoods voting for Trump in the last election; many of these Trump voters also voted for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani.¹⁶ The influx of South Asian and Latin American migrants has also meant that longtime working class political constituencies—white ethnics and African Americans)—are losing electoral weight and power. Their most visible politicians—Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo—not only represent these versions of these demographic groups, they wield these identities in a reactionary resistance against change. With their recognizable New York accents, they, paradoxically, represent an odd coalition of New York City moneybrokers and older Black and white working class voters —a strange inversion of the New Deal LaGuardia era.

Mamdani’s paradoxical blackness and whiteness—the way antisemitism is used against Mamdani to suggest he is both against Jews and receives their money—suggests how socialism itself not only produces new political subjects, but scrambles old ones.

Of course, the most salient, if the least local, cleavage has been over the question of Zionism. While figures of the New York City Jewish establishment—including nearly all of the Chasidic neighborhoods—vocally supported Cuomo, an insurgent left wing Jewish community openly backed Mamdani. Led by visible and well known New York City progressives such as Brad Lander and Maurice Mitchell of Working Families Party (WFP), Mamdani’s support also included vibrant and broad-based Jewish organizations in New York, including Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the magazine Jewish Currents, and a coalition under the name of “Jews for Zohran.” In a city with the largest Jewish population in the world —nearly twice that of Tel Aviv—the intra-Jewish battle over Mamdani serves as a metonym for a larger, even global, Jewish battle over the meaning of being Jewish in the world. While surely Jews have multiple reasons to support either candidate—including class status, political connections, ideas about municipal government—Cuomo’s support for Israel and Mamdani’s vocal criticism of it have been at the center of Jewish divide over the two candidates. The fact that claims of Mamdani’s supposed antisemitism only seemed to galvanize progressive Jewish support suggests that the very definition of “Jewishness” is at stake in this battle.

In his gloss on Marx’s Grundrisse, Hall emphasizes that “complex unities…formed by their difference” are not the same as Hegel’s simple “unity within opposites.”¹⁷ That is to say, it would be easy to suggest antisemitism and Islamophobia have now formed mirror opposites to one another as discourses: to the extent that “Jewish safety” has been taken up as a cause by everyone from Elise Stefanik to Andrew Cuomo, Islamophobia is posed as its opposite, with both discourses unified by a totalizing system of white supremacy. Yet the “complex unities…formed by its difference” is defined as much now by its hidden unity as its incommensurable difference: antisemitism, Islamophobia, race, and class are as much stable signs of opposition as they are themselves internally divided over meanings. They are unified after a fashion, as even rightwing understandings of antisemitism rely on the progressive memory of antifascism in much the same way that many Islamophobic conservatives will invoke liberal ideals of formal equality in their demonization of “illiberal” Islam. And yet antisemitism and like terms such as Islam, Jewishness, Indianness, and socialism are contested categories—the words themselves articulating difference rather than definition.

In this way, “racial identity” has been a language to narrate, contain, and contest power not only by an insurgent socialist left, but also by a conservative and wealthy power bloc that seeks to maintain the status quo. One of the more pervasive narratives of the election was that Mamdani “struggled to win the Black vote.”¹⁸ While it is true that Cuomo won a majority of Black voters (especially in majority Black precincts), much like the Jewish vote in NYC, the narrative breaks down as soon as it’s analyzed with any scrutiny. As Mychal Denzel Smith writes for The Intercept, “There is no singular ’Black vote’…not in New York City, where the Black population is a wildly diverse mix of native-born New Yorkers, transplants like me, immigrants from the entire diaspora, radicals, conservatives, queer people, churchgoers, Muslims, and older and younger residents.”¹⁹ Yet the narrative of Cuomo and Adam’s racial appeal to African Americans and Jews rests not on the liberatory appeal to antiracism, but on conservative arguments of elite representation and, more than anything else, investments in police and other forms of carceral security. As Cuomo offers “Jewish safety” before keffiyeh-clad protestors, so Adams offers increased police surveillance for Black neighborhoods in the name of security.²⁰ One could say it is a neoliberal approach to racial meaning-making, posing “racial identity” in Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s words as an “ever narrower conception of group interest” in a world of scarce resources inter-group competition.²¹

This is distinct from, though not wholly separate from, the politics of white supremacy. Many of the attacks on Mamdani have been and continue to be openly racist. Attacks against Omar Fateh (the DSA candidate for mayor of Minneapolis) are often even more openly racist, as they combine anti-Blackness with Islamophobia most succinctly summarized in a series of high traction social media posts that claimed “no one with the name Omar served in the Civil War,” suggesting that neither African Americans nor Muslims are foundational to American history. Yet claims that Mamdani cannot attract Black voters or serve Jewish interests are less a straightforward narrative of white supremacy than an attempt to deploy the politics of racial authenticity to enforce the status quo. In Hallsian terms, Cuomo and Adams appeal to the “traditional Democratic voter” in the way Hall described “the traditional Labour voter”—by freezing static and conservative ideas about race in the same way Labour attempted to freeze static and conservative ideas of class (northern, in heavy industry, male, and so on). Thus the refractory and contradictory way Mamdani appears as a racialized and deracinated subject—one who is simultaneously alien, Other, and foreign, yet has no authentic racial identity—is an objective correlative for the way Mamdani’s socialist politics threatens to undo and remake an electoral map in which “demographics,” for a time at least, appeared “to be destiny.”²²

To be clear, the candidacy of Mamdani and Fateh are antiracist; the mobilizations of race, authenticity, and security by Cuomo and Adams may not rely on racist tropes but do rely on a world of increased scarcity, inequality, and disinvestment that will have distinctly racist outcomes, even as they may benefit some wealthier African Americans and other racialized minorities in the short-term. One could say we have two different projects of racial politics on offer. To quote Omi and Winant’s foundational Racial Formation in the United States, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have witnessed competing Gramscian mobilizations for hegemony through the organization and reorganization of race: to put simply, antiracist Reconstruction democracy and white supremacy.²³ With the emergence of multicultural neoliberalism in the 1990s, a new “racial project” articulated a form of ethnic and racial representation that borrowed the language of 1960s Reconstruction democracy and yet, at best, served the class interests of a largely white but increasingly multiethnic ruling class and top “1%.” The clash then, between Mamdani and both Cuomo and Adams can be understood as a multiracial social democracy (the original Reconstruction project) and a multiracial neoliberalism, both of which see the other as illegitimate representatives of racialized constituencies even if, as I would argue, Cuomo and Adams’ Islamophobia and antisemitism signify their collusion with the forces of whiteness.

And in this way, we can say that socialism itself is both engaged in the production of new identities and the challenging of older ones. Social and socialist movements have challenged and even reversed previously stable categories of Blackness and whiteness, of city and country, of worker and capital. The new New York City electorate is a map of realignments and change in identities: younger Black and Jewish voters overwhelmingly support Mamdani, while older voters rejected him; newer immigrants such as South Asian and Latinx communities support Mamdani; older immigrant communities supported Cuomo; the very rich and the very poor support Cuomo; the new working class formations support Mamdani. That Mamdani, post-election, is able to pull both large labor unions with immigrant service workers (such as SEIU 1199) and members of the working class not represented by unions suggests a new polity in the making. Generationally, the old New Deal and Great Society coalitions are no longer with us, even if the desire for their social democratic parties are. To quote Nicos Poulantzas, “there are no social classes prior to their opposition in struggle”—which is another way of saying politics produces its own subject of address.²⁴

Islamophobia and antisemitism are deployed discursively then to arrest such new developments. The Jewish subject in need of state protection and Jewish money attempting to subvert the state are the flip side of a mercurial foreign Muslim who both threatens vulnerable minorities and cannot connect to the Apollonian New Yorkers rooted to their neighborhoods, their precincts, their race, and their Party. Such forms of racism speak to how race still narrates class—and in this case, both the class and racial formations are under severe strain and transition. Mamdani’s paradoxical blackness and whiteness—the way antisemitism is used against Mamdani to suggest he is both against Jews and receives their money—suggests how socialism itself not only produces new political subjects, but scrambles old ones. The electoral map in which neoliberal Democrats can rely on stable voting blocs to deliver their candidates while not delivering on promises seems to be over. That such politics relies on another form of racism—Islamophobia—only emphasizes the way in which such claims to authenticity are exclusionary and conservative. To the extent that Mamdani and now Fateh’s actual sense of themselves must be mystified is the extent to which such stable and negative categories must reassert themselves to shore up the ruins of an exhausted politics.

Anti-semitism, Islamophobia, New York City, Politics, Racism, USA

Benjamin Balthaser

Benjamin Balthaser is Associate Professor of Multi-Ethnic US Literature at Indiana University, South Bend. He is the author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism (U Michigan Press, 2016), Dedication (Partisan, 2011), and most recently, Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the American Jewish Left (Verso, 2025).

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