In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.
Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist whose thin record of paid employment included passing three bills in four years as a New York state assemblyman, was elected mayor of America’s single largest city. And in defiance of the polls, he won an outright majority of the vote to do it. New York City also has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, a fact that wouldn’t be all that relevant except for the single-minded focus Mamdani has maintained on Jews for his entire adult life.
Mamdani’s obsession with boycotting Israel and denying the right of a Jewish state to exist goes back to his undergraduate days over a decade ago, but his insistence on “globalizing the intifada” was reiterated throughout his mayoral campaign. In the final month before his victory, Mamdani refused to call on Hamas to give up its arms in accordance with the Gaza ceasefire deal, insisted he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in accordance with a warrant by the International Criminal Court (whose jurisdiction the United States is not actually subject to), and proudly posted a photo with Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that was indeed partially motivated by the terrorists’s desire to kill Jews.
WITH ‘FRIENDS’ LIKE CARLSON AND FUENTES, WHO NEEDS KEVIN ROBERTS’S HERITAGE FOUNDATION
While Mamdani tried to play nice during his campaign, pasting on a Cheshire cat smile as he tried to focus on idiotic solutions to the very real problem of cost of living, his victory seemed to allow him to drop the facade. Mamdani quoted Marxists during his election night speech and spent the day bragging about his support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. New Yorkers in general, not just the city’s million Jews, should expect the worst but hope, pray, and fight for the best because antisemitism is no mere assault on Jews. Rather, the world’s oldest hatred has cost every civilization that has turned prejudice into policy, and our financial and cultural capital cannot forget it.
Let us pretend that you don’t care about Jews, nor the slaughter of 6 million of them during the Holocaust, nor the 1,200 of them killed on Oct. 7, 2023, nor those in New York today. The French-Tunisian essayist Albert Memmi was not wrong when he wrote that “a society that wishes to liberate humankind must naturally liberate its Jews.” A polity’s treatment of Jews is also a broader leading indicator of its overarching prosperity.
The most explicit and ham-fisted example of this was medieval England’s gradual revolt against its Jews.
French Jews first came to England with the rest of the Normans after 1066, when William the Conqueror specifically invited Jews to come practice finance under the crown’s protection. Although the medieval Catholic Church wrongly believed that the New Testament banned lending at interest, William understood that a new government required the liquidity allowed by what we understand as contemporary finance. So he used the Jews, who were not subject to canon law but would be subject to the king’s law, to do it. The system worked well enough until the imperial ambitions of Edward I in Wales, Scotland, and Gascony began bankrupting the crown. First, with the not-at-all subtly named 1275 Statute of the Jewry, Edward I banned lending at interest and canceled debts owed to the Jews in the hope of freeing up that capital so the crown could tax it further. But in effect, the law dried up what remained of Jewish finance, which had already been taxed to the point of negligible returns. Just 15 years later, Edward I expelled Jews from England entirely, and if you know anything about the next 200 years of English history, you know that all England lived happily ever after.
Just kidding! Because the crown was still broke and had outlawed and expelled its domestic source of credit, England had to rely on foreign creditors, primarily in the Florentine city-state, which had its own foreign policy interests. After Edward III began his bid for the French throne, which would become the disastrous Hundred Years’ War, he owed just two Italian financiers, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, some 1.5 million gold florins in debt, or the equivalent of more than two years of the crown’s entire revenue. When Edward III effectively defaulted, bankrupting both Italian houses and the rest of the republic, Florentine lenders abandoned the English cause to back the French. The English then pivoted to the Low Countries, and although Henry V’s military prowess allowed England to appear victorious for a moment, his untimely death left behind an infant king and a debt that had reached the equivalent of a tenth of England’s entire economic output by the time he reached adulthood. The pound, which had become dependent on the Low Countries, fluctuated wildly. When the Burgundians abandoned the English cause for the French, the English definitively lost the Hundred Years’ War, and its economy collapsed, setting the stage for the 30 years of civil war that followed, known as the War of the Roses.
If you guessed that the War of the Roses was largely determined by Edward IV and then Henry VII enacting hard currency policies and cracking down on the debt to relieve their houses from the whims of foreign finance, you would be correct. But England’s 200 years of financial dominance only came about after Oliver Cromwell readmitted Jews to the country, onshoring the international investment that would finance England’s ability to issue bonds on a mass scale and what would become the Bank of England.
I mention all of this not because you should only value Jews for their storied prowess as financiers but to illustrate the broader point that antisemitism is a suicidal impulse motivated by grievance politics. And while Democrats may have been delusional enough to elect a socialist who, at best, can be described as tolerant of and complicit in spreading antisemitic propaganda and policies, the Right is far from immune to the impulse.
While the rest of the GOP was laser-focused on the eventual doom that befell the party on Tuesday, Tucker Carlson, who hosts the second-highest rated podcast listed by Spotify, spent one of his final episodes before Election Day befriending Nick Fuentes. “What is the difference between Fuentes and Mamdani?” you may ask. Unlike Fuentes, who has said having sex with women is “gay” and is an involuntary celibate, Mamdani is actually married to a woman. And unlike Fuentes, who is pushing 30 years old while podcasting from his mother’s basement, Mamdani has an actual job. Other than that, the two are rather similar.
Like Mamdani, who has befriended radical Islamic terrorists while building his entire brand around his opposition to a Jewish statehood, Fuentes is a self-described supporter of Joseph Stalin and the Taliban (or as he calls it, “the liberators of Afghanistan“). Both have spread conspiracy theories about Israel, denied the country’s legitimacy, and cast its terrorist aggressors, such as Iran and Hezbollah, as victims rather than the perpetrators of the post-Oct. 7 calamities in the Middle East. Fuentes, explicitly in his Holocaust denialism, has called for his supporters to rape and murder in his name, but his economics are no less Marxist and based on grievance.
This is why it’s so baffling that the Heritage Foundation, once the Right’s premier moral gatekeeper and intellectual tastemaker, is one week into a scandal of its own making due to its defense of Carlson’s decision to embrace Fuentes. While the think tank’s president, Kevin Roberts, has apologized for calling Carlson’s critics the “venomous coalition” and condemned Fuentes’s views, he has not apologized or walked back his insistence that Carlson is a “friend” to either the institution of the movement more broadly.
Fuentes’s inability to couch his bigotry in the charm or strategy of Mamdani is as abhorrent as it is helpful in illustrating how antisemitism is always a means of absolving the bigot of blame. Fuentes has repeatedly blamed Jews for the “breakdown of white cohesion,” American foreign policy, private companies such as PayPal and YouTube deciding to ban him, and even his inability to get laid. (“It’s that the Jews,” Fuentes said in 2023, “made society degenerate.)
To understand how the opportunity cost of this antisemitism is real, however, let’s head back to the end of the 15th century.
While Henry VII was knitting together England’s finances after 148 years of failed wars, the Spanish reconquered Andalusia from the Moors and sent Columbus to discover the New World, cementing Spain as the world’s rising imperial power. But when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Ferdinand and Isabella also expelled the Jews who had lived in the Iberian Peninsula since antiquity. Spain’s need for foreign credit was dulled by the eventually inflationary influxes of gold and silver imported from America. And because of the incestuous marriage networks of the Habsburgs, the Spanish eventually obtained dominion over the Dutch and their domestic financiers, who, not coincidentally, also employed the Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain.
But after a century of Spanish attempts to bleed Dutch financiers dry, the Dutch created their own hard currency, issued their own bonds, and fought for independence. The Dutch Republic became the West’s dominant economic power, while the Spanish Empire collapsed. The Dutch guilder remained the world’s reserve currency for a century — until it was rivaled by and then dominated by the British pound, in no small part due to Cromwell’s readmission of Jews to England.
The lesson here is not that Jews are good at finance, though that is demonstrably true. It’s that one society that treats Jews like trash will eventually be outpaced by one that treats them, if not like treasure, at least like human beings worthy of dignity and respect. As a direct consequence of Hitler’s persecution of Jews, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and countless other Jewish physicists fled to the West and eventually contributed to the Manhattan Project that spelled the Axis defeat.
DON’T LET TUCKER CARLSON’S DEFENDERS GASLIGHT YOU ABOUT FREE SPEECH
Americans should abhor antisemitism on the grounds that such bigotry is antithetical to a nation specifically founded on the premise that all men are created equal, and our dream should be obtained as a product of merit. Christians in particular should loathe antisemitism as an offense against Jesus, a Jew who specifically commanded his followers to love their neighbors regardless of ethnic differences.
But if moral reasons are not enough, self-interest should be. A society that respects the lives of its Jews is one that enforces the rule of law more generally, and one that respects Jewish livelihoods is one that celebrates merit and prosperity. A political faction that cannot explicate its intolerance for antisemitism isn’t just one that deserves to lose; it’s a team that will doom itself to political losses and punish the rest of us with decreased prosperity. The world’s oldest hatred is also its oldest harbinger of a civilizational decline to come.
