Four panelists, one argument: the largest Jewish city outside Israel is the test case, and the rest of the country is the prize.

Zohran Mamdani needed 18 lawyers to screen candidates for the New York City bench. Jewish attorneys make up the largest single bloc of lawyers in the city. He appointed none of them.

Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch, compared Mamdani’s New York to Germany in 1933.

“In 1933, Hitler didn’t open up Auschwitz and the other death camps,” Spencer told several thousand people last week on an Israel365 webinar titled “Mamdani’s NYC: A Warning to America.” “That was years later. What he did first was initiate boycotts, nationwide boycotts of Jewish businesses, and this is exactly the same kind of thing that Mamdani is doing in New York now.”

Spencer and three other panelists argued that Mamdani did not create New York’s antisemitism problem, and that removing him would not solve it. He is the product of an alliance between the Democratic Socialists of America and political Islam that has already taken the city’s institutions, and that alliance is now running candidates in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles. New York went first because New York is worth the most.

Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, executive director of Israel365 Action, hosted the panel, which included Shabbos Kestenbaum, the Harvard graduate who sued the university over campus antisemitism and now writes for PragerU; Spencer, author of Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani; Ariella Noveck, who covers antisemitism for Fox News Digital and JNS; and Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch, a New York therapist and activist who runs RabbiForAmerica.com.

‘The story of October 7th is the story of October 8th’

Wolicki asked Kestenbaum what the campus antisemitism fight taught him, and whether anyone learned anything from it.

Kestenbaum said the October 7 massacre itself taught nothing. Hamas wrote its charter in plain language, and its behavior on October 7 matched the document.

“When terrorists commit acts of terrorism, it’s bad, and of course there must be a forceful response,” he said. “But again, definitionally, it’s what terrorists do. To me, therefore, the story of October 7th is the story of October 8th.”

On October 8, as Hamas gunmen were still shooting Jews in their homes and dragging hostages across the border, 34 student organizations at Harvard signed a statement holding Israel responsible for the massacre being committed against it. The feminist club signed it. So did the Muslim association. They drafted it overnight, Kestenbaum said, while the images moved through WhatsApp: Naama Levy dragged bleeding into a jeep, the infant Kfir Bibas carried into Gaza on a motorcycle, the charred bodies of teenagers pulled out of the Nova festival grounds.

The same morning, Darializa Avila Chevalier marched through Manhattan with the DSA. She now holds the Democratic nomination in New York’s 13th congressional district.

“That to me is where the story begins because it’s the most progressive, the most elite, the most sensitive, those who introduce themselves with preferred gender pronouns, those who take knees for Black Lives Matter, who consider themselves to be social justice warriors,” Kestenbaum said. “They saw the massacre of 48 American citizens and then they cheered on the terrorists who did that thing.”

“They will tell you that resistance is justified when people are occupied,” Kestenbaum said. “There is no amount of brutality or savagery that Hamas could commit that would in any way force them to change their politics.”

Kestenbaum blames the professors. “They normalized, accepted, and in many cases celebrated and encouraged this culture of antisemitism, of anti-Americanism, and just blatant toleration of terrorism in this country.”

Harvard was the first university in the world to screen the 47-minute compilation of Hamas body-camera footage. Bill Ackman came. Gilad Erdan, then Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, came. Claudine Gay, then Harvard’s president, skipped it to prepare for the congressional testimony she would deliver the next day. Several hundred people showed up – but almost every one of them was Jewish. 

Spencer: the boycotts came first

Spencer said his 1933 comparison is precise rather than rhetorical. The Nazis spent their first years pushing Jews out of German commercial and civic life, and the judicial screening panel does the same work on a smaller scale. He described it as the latest step in a systematic removal of Jews from every position of influence that has come up for reappointment since Mamdani took office.

Spencer also cited the administration’s withdrawal of police protection against demonstrations outside houses of worship, which he says targets synagogues. He pointed to the SUV that a driver rammed into the entrance of a Brooklyn synagogue.

“I pray that it won’t end up the same way it did in Germany,” Spencer said. “However, we would be naive if we think he’s going to stop with this.”

‘A distinction without a difference’

Wolicki asked whether Mamdani is a Muslim who happens to be a socialist or a socialist who happens to be a Muslim.

“I think that’s a distinction without a difference,” Spencer said. “And the key that binds them both together is authoritarianism.”

Speaking to the DSA in 2021, Mamdani told the organization to keep its eyes on the ultimate goal, which is seizing the means of production. Nobody hands over a factory voluntarily, Spencer said, so somebody has to take it. 

“The fact is that socialism works on brute force. Islam works on brute force,” he said. “They both actually work on the basis of terror.” The Soviets arrested people they knew to be innocent, he said, so that innocence would stop protecting anyone. Islamic law achieves the same result with the severed hand, the severed head and the stoning.

Spencer said the opposing tradition starts in the first chapter of Genesis, which teaches that God made man in His own image. Every person therefore carries dignity, and every person can reason. A government that accepts those two claims has to let its citizens choose it, Spencer said, which is where the idea of a republic comes from. Communism and Islam both start somewhere else. Under both, a person matters only as part of the whole, “and if you do not conform to the collective, then you can cheerfully be killed.”

Spencer said the socialists chose New York because a win there breaks the rest of the country open. “New York is still the biggest and most important city in the United States, and if they can make it into a socialist petri dish, then the rest of the country will be a lot easier to compel into falling in line.” He said the same campaign is running in Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles. Omar Fateh lost Minneapolis, Spencer said, only because Mayor Jacob Frey outbid him for the support of the city’s Somali and Marxist blocs.

He warned against underestimating the mayor. “He’s not a cardboard cutout who is the prop for other people. He believes very deeply in what he’s doing. He’s intelligent and he’s deeply committed, and so he’s extremely dangerous.”

Noveck: what the administration actually did

Noveck brought numbers.

This past July, the NYPD logged an antisemitic hate crime in New York City roughly every 25 hours. Jewish New Yorkers absorbed about 70 percent of all reported hate crimes. Through seven months of 2026, the department counted 205 antisemitic incidents, against 189 over the same stretch last year. Noveck said the July figure shocked her when she found it while reporting for Fox News Digital.

She has attended Jewish communal events at Gracie Mansion under previous mayors. Jewish New Yorkers arrived at those evenings, she said, “as their complete selves, with their faith, their history, and connection to Israel.”

Mamdani skipped the Israel Day parade, then invited the community to a Jewish heritage event at the mansion. Two of the city’s most prominent Jewish organizations declined, and Noveck reported the refusals for Fox News Digital. The administration expects Jewish New Yorkers to leave Israel at the door.

“Inviting Jewish people into a room is not necessarily the same as hearing them, representing them, or making them feel safe,” she said.

Every politician condemns antisemitism after an attack, Noveck said, and the statement costs him nothing. She judges an administration by what it does before the next attack. “The real test is what happens when the Jewish concerns become personally inconvenient,” she said, and she put the question to the audience directly: “Can a mayor condemn antisemitism while contributing to the climate Jewish New Yorkers fear?”

City Hall answers with $26 million in hate prevention funding. Noveck said the mayor cannot spend one hand on programs meant to cool the climate while the other hand heats it, and she pointed to what he did while the NYPD numbers climbed. He renewed his demand that the city arrest Israel’s prime minister, an order no mayor has the authority to give.

Schonbuch: 1917 and 1979

Nazi Germany is not the only precedent worth studying, Schonbuch said. He pointed to two revolutions: the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, and Khomeini in Iran in 1979. America today looks most like Russia in 1917.

Lenin used democracy to take power in Russia and dropped it the moment he had it, Schonbuch said, because the Bolsheviks only ever needed the vote as a ladder. He argued that the DSA has stopped hiding the same plan. He pointed to a Fox News appearance by DSA co-chair Megan Romer, who listed what the organization actually wants: abolish the Senate, abolish the Electoral College, restructure the Supreme Court and the presidency, abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, remake the criminal justice and immigration systems, open the borders and shut down the Pentagon.

“Mamdani is the front of it, but what’s coming out very rapidly is very frightening,” Schonbuch said. “He talks about affordability. What they want is to seize the means of production.”

His second year is 1979, and he offered it as a warning to the left half of the Red-Green alliance. Iran’s communists and socialists spent that year helping Ayatollah Khomeini overthrow the Shah. Within four years, Khomeini had arrested them, imprisoned them and executed them, and he built his Islamic republic on top of the movement that put him in power. The alliance has run this experiment once already, Schonbuch said, and only one side of it walked away.

Both movements promise the same thing, in his reading. “Communism is secular messianism, and Islamic fundamentalism is a form of Islamic messianism,” he said. Communism takes the biblical vision of all nations living under one rule and installs a committee where God belongs. Twelver Shiism, the branch of Islam that governs Iran, waits for an apocalypse and works to bring it closer. Secular America cannot beat either one, Schonbuch said, because forty years of DEI left it holding nothing worth defending.

He warned that the movement has already moved past New York. Abdul El-Sayed, the former Detroit health director and Bernie Sanders ally, now holds Michigan’s Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Francesca Hong, a Wisconsin state representative and dues-paying DSA member, lost her party’s primary for governor by only 4,000 votes out of more than 300,000 cast.

Taking back the streets

New Yorkers have already started organizing against Mamdani, and Schonbuch said the coalition surprised him.

A rally outside Gracie Mansion drew more than a thousand people, and he went through the crowd: Jews, Christians, African Americans, Latinos, Hindus and, to his own surprise, Muslim Zionists. End Jew Hatred has scheduled another for September 8 outside DSA offices in New York.

“On October 7th and 8th, Hamas took over the streets of New York and Columbia University,” Schonbuch said. “We intend to take back the streets of New York City.”

He also pointed to Albany. Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive challenging Gov. Kathy Hochul, trails by ten points in recent polling, and a governor can override nearly anything a mayor attempts.

Kestenbaum said the mayor is the smaller problem. Mamdani was born in Uganda and cannot run for president, no New York mayor has won higher office in decades, and the job carries a term limit. What worries him is the permission structure underneath the man. Roughly 500,000 New Yorkers voted for a candidate who called for a global intifada and made promises he knew he could not keep, and a majority of city residents still tell pollsters they approve of him. Those people are not going anywhere when Mamdani leaves office.

“That to me is the bigger problem,” said Kestenbaum