Harry Liberman
Click Image to Enlarge. Image created via AI.
What New York’s Jewish Community Has Yet to Learn from their most valuable and interesting Jewish History
History rarely repeats itself word for word, yet its rhythms are unmistakable to those willing to listen. For more than a century, New York City has stood as a beacon of Jewish safety, cultural flourishing, and civic integration.
Today, as Jewish institutions require heightened security and open hostility increasingly enters the public square, a sobering historical warning demands attention. In his video commentary on Simcha Jacobovici’s Facebook Page and his November 5, 2026 episode on Simcha’s Sessions on YouTube, titled Mamdani’s Alter Ego: A Warning to New York’s Jews, Canadian-Israeli filmmaker and investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici connects the fate of pre-Holocaust Vienna to the political climate unfolding in New York today. In Jacobovici’s framing, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s relationship to New York’s civic climate mirrors the role former Vienna Mayor Karl Lueger once played. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
As Jacobovici documents in his Vienna dispatch, behind the Austrian capital’s architectural splendor lies a stark indictment of European civic failure, where Jewish kindergartens, schools, and synagogues operate behind military guards and protective barriers. Embedded in the city’s cobblestones are Stolpersteine—small golden brass plaques marking the homes where Jewish families lived before 65,000 Austrian Jews were deported and murdered in the Holocaust, nearly erasing a community that once defined the city’s intellectual life.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna was one of the world’s premier centers of Jewish life, with Jews standing at the forefront of its arts, medicine, psychoanalysis, physics, and literature.
Between 1897 and 1910, Vienna was governed by Karl Lueger, a populist mayor who transformed latent social prejudice into mainstream political currency. Although Emperor Franz Joseph initially refused to confirm Lueger’s election for two years due to his overt antisemitism, Lueger took office in 1897 and normalized hostility toward Jews in the civic discourse of a modern metropolis. [1, 2]
In his broadcast, Jacobovici draws direct parallels between Lueger and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, describing Lueger as “the Mamdani of Vienna” and stating that Mamdani presides over a city while opposing the right of the Jewish people and state to exist. Jacobovici further notes that Lueger “created the conditions for the Nazis”. [1]
Mamdani illiteracy is to New York what Idi Amin’s ” Third Worldism” was to Uganda
In Zohran Mamdani Learned All the Wrong Lessons from Idi Amin’s Third Worldism, researcher Joshua Meservey argues that Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America embrace an ideological framework that divides the world into Western/Israeli “oppressors” and developing-world “victims,” overlooking how Idi Amin’s anti-Western nationalism [ironically]led to the 1972 expulsion of Mamdani’s own family from Uganda and state-backed anti-Jewish terror. [1] A Book Review of Mahmood Mamdani’s Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni and the Making of the Ugandan State notes how Zohran Mamdani’s father, scholar Mahmood Mamdani, attributes Idi Amin’s rise primarily to British and Israeli influence while largely omitting Amin’s 1976 collusion with Palestinian and German hijackers against Jewish hostages at Entebbe. [1]
The illiterate Pro Iranian Marxist pro Hamas Islamist Mamdani inadvertently called Ten Million American Christians “Monsters”!!
Mamdani’s illiteracy ignores how during the 1979 Iranian Revolution—in which leftist, communist, and Marxist factions allied with Islamist revolutionaries to overthrow the Shah—Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consolidated power by outlawing, imprisoning, and executing his former Marxist allies [ purging some 30,000 progressive leftist Marxists ] during the 1980s, culminating in the mass prison executions of summer 1988. [1]
The 30,000 Estimate: The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) Archive and UK Parliament Early Day Motion 59101 cite figures of up to 30,000 Marxist political prisoners executed between July 1988 and early 1989 and buried in unmarked mass graves. [1, 2]
The reality of pro-Israel advocacy and historical faith coalitions in the United States contrasts sharply with how they are portrayed in Mamdani’s rhetoric. While Mamdani has publicly referred to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as “monsters”moving “millions in dark money”, the broader pro-Israel movement in America is overwhelmingly composed of Christian Americans. Organizations such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI) alone count over 10 million members—a Christian Zionist base that exceeds the entire Jewish population of the United States.
That deep-seated Christian solidarity is rooted in the historical and scriptural reality of Jesus of Nazareth’s own Jewish ancestry and life in the Land of Israel. As recorded in the New Testament Gospels—including Mark 1:21–28 and Luke 4:31–36—Jesus regularly entered the Synagogue of Capernaum on the Sabbath to deliver rabbinical sermons and teach fellow Jews. Living as a first-century Jew in Galilee, Jesus preached exclusively within Jewish and Roman contexts, centuries before the emergence of Islam in the seventh century or modern Palestinian nationalism. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
Ironically Mamdani’s political alignment with terrorist anti American pro 911 Hamas and organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) carries its own documented federal record. While CAIR operates as a civil rights advocacy group and has not been criminally convicted as an entity, federal prosecutors named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007–2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial. In 2009, U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis refused to expunge that designation after finding that the government had produced “ample evidence” linking CAIR to Hamas and its U.S. support network. [1, 2]
The historical trajectory of Mamdani’s birthplace, Uganda, also provides a documented counterpoint.
In July 1976, under the dictatorship of Idi Amin—who aligned with Soviet-backed Marxist regimes and Islamist states after expelling Israeli advisors—Palestinian and German extremists hijacked an Air France flight to Entebbe, separating Jewish and Israeli passengers from non-Jews. Following the ouster of Amin and the rise of President Yoweri Museveni, Uganda pivoted away from ideological hostility to become a close security and diplomatic ally of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On August 1, 2026, Uganda’s military unveiled a bronze monument at Entebbe Airport honoring Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu—the Israeli commander and brother of Prime Minister Netanyahu who died leading the 1976 hostage rescue—a gesture of reconciliation and repudiation of Amin’s actions that Netanyahu publicly thanked Uganda for at the United Nations. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
Upon taking office on January 1, 2026, Mayor Mamdani revoked New York City’s executive order adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism and rescinded the municipal ban on boycotting and divesting from Israel—a decision that prompted a U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee inquiry led by Chairman Bill Cassidy. [1, 2, 3]
Jacobovici observes that Lueger’s tenure established a “permission structure” in what was known as “Black Vienna,” allowing street-level harassment and vandalism to escalate into severe violence. Warning that modern New Yorkers risk repeating historical errors, Jacobovici states that Viennese Jews “confused cultural high-fives, cultural success, with physical security” and implores American Jews: “beware, Jews of America, don’t let New York turn into Vienna.”
In early twentieth-century Vienna, the political and intellectual movement known as “Black Vienna”—rooted in Mayor Karl Lueger’s Christian Social populism—dismantled civic taboos by legitimizing anti-Jewish rhetoric from City Hall, creating a permission structure where street-level harassment, boycotts of Jewish shops, and physical assaults against Jews on university campuses and public boulevards became routine long before the 1938 Nazi Anschluss.
Today, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rhetoric and municipal actions—including revoking the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, rescinding bans on anti-Israel boycotts, and framing pro-Israel groups as “monsters”—follow such an identical ideological playbook of selective acceptance and political scapegoating that Mamdani and Lueger could have been best friends, a dynamic coinciding with NYPD crime data showing anti-Jewish hate crimes surging to over half of all confirmed bias attacks in New York City in 2026 as visibly identifiable Jewish New Yorkers endure street stabbings, physical assaults, and synagogue vandalism .
True civic leadership requires more than funding security barriers outside synagogues or issuing formal denunciations after an attack occurs. It requires refusing to normalize rhetoric that places an entire community on the defensive.
New York is destined to follow Vienna’s tragic trajectory—but avoiding that path begins with learning the lesson of Vienna while there is still time to heed it.
Israpundit is entirely dependent on readers support. Please help me continue educating people with the truth about what is going on in Israel and around the world.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.