The surge of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment in New York – culminating in the election of an avowedly antizionist mayor – should serve as a warning to Jews in the US and across the West, a leading antisemitism expert and senior American Jewish communal figure has said.
If it can happen in New York, the city with the largest concentration of Jews outside Israel, it can happen anywhere – “potentially even in the single most important place, Washington DC,” David Harris, executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), told a JC audience of more than 100 at South Hampstead Synagogue on Monday.
In a conversation with JC editor Daniel Schwammenthal, he explored how antisemitism has evolved across history and pointed to Qatar as a principal factor in enabling Zohran Mamdani’s rise to City Hall.
The shift on American campuses and in wider public life, he said, was not spontaneous but the product of sustained “networking, planning and funding”. He highlighted Doha’s extensive financial footprint in US higher education, alongside its support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Harris, the long-serving former leader of the American Jewish Committee, said the events of October 8 showed how quickly those networks were able to activate.
“What explains the fact that on October 8 – 24 hours after Hamas’s attack – 34 student groups at America’s pre-eminent university, Harvard, declared that Israel and Israel alone was responsible?” he asked. “What had happened?”
The answer, he suggested, was to “follow the money”.
“Why had one tiny country with fewer than 350,000 citizens – Qatar – become the principal foreign funder of American higher education?”
Harris, author of Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know, said such developments should be understood not as isolated campus unrest but as part of a wider ideological and financial ecosystem.
In his assessment, that ecosystem helped clear the political path for Mamdani’s victory, allowing him to “cakewalk” into office.
“We have today in the United States members of Congress, elected officials in both political parties, who have voiced antisemitic views and paid no price,” he said, arguing that the “networking and funding of the deeper, darker forces – Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood” had produced the “biggest shock of all”: that New York now has a mayor from the hard left who has surrounded himself with figures who make no pretence about where they stand on Israel or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
His verdict on New York’s trajectory was blunt: “We failed.” Had this occurred in another city, he said, “it could perhaps be rationalised”. But the fact that it happened in a metropolis with such a vast Jewish population, widely regarded as an epicentre of cultural, economic, social and political power, meant that “all bets are off”.
Yet he insisted despair was not an option. Pointing to Israel’s response after October 7, he praised the young Israelis – Druze, Christians, Muslims and Jews – who cut short holidays to return and serve in the IDF, knowing they were risking their lives. They went into booby-trapped tunnels, confronted Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed forces, and adapted with speed and ingenuity on the battlefield.
“I want a spinal transplant from those 21-, 22- and 23-year-old Israeli men and women,” he said, holding up their courage and sense of responsibility as a model for diaspora communities confronting hostility in universities, civil society and politics.
“If Israel, which is facing genocidal threats, could recover and take the battle to the enemy, then we [in the diaspora], faced with the challenges at the universities and the human rights organisations and some political parties and spaces, should follow Israel’s lead,” he added.
“We Jews are commanded never to succumb to despair. We are the people of Tikva – of hope,” he said, describing the struggle as civilisational – a battle over the future not only of the Jewish people but of the West itself.
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