While New York’s Jewish communities are far too numerous, and far too fractious, to jam into one single story, there is still a narrative that gets spun. It goes like this. After the second world war, Jews made bank, assimilated into America, and fell in love with Israel. (Never mind the many communities this story leaves out – the booming, non-Zionist, utterly unassimilated Satmar community; the Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union; the dykes and freaks and commies and artists; Bernard Sanders. The list goes on.) The institutions associated with the narrative – the Anti-Defamation League, posh New York synagogues – have been Mamdani’s most virulent attackers.
The hysteria of this elite over Mamdani’s ascent would have seemed bizarre to so many of their great-grandparents. In New York at the turn of the century, Jewish workers created a secular, socialist, but specifically Yiddish world. By the time my own great-grandfather turned up in Ellis Island in 1904, this sort of socialism was alive on every Lower East Side street – in the mutual aid societies, debate clubs, picket lines, night schools, and the lectures that Jewish workers obsessively attended. Socialist Yiddish papers sold 120,000 copies a day. The socialist Workmen’s Circle attracted tens of thousands of members in hundreds of branches across America and educated thousands of children at their secular Yiddish schools. Two garment workers unions, led by former Jewish revolutionaries, represented more than 100,000 workers between them. And in 1912, the Yiddish, socialist newspaper The Forward constructed a beaux-arts skyscraper on the corner of Rutgers Square on the Lower East Side. “Where is the synagogue of our Jewish workers? Where is the temple of freedom, of equality, of brotherhood?” Forward editor Abe Cahan asked. That building was his attempt at an answer.
Cahan adorned the Forward Building’s facade with busts of Marx and Engels, but on the Lower East Side, socialism meant more than the words of these two men. It was the idiom of something broad, free and generous – the fight for a better and more beautiful world. To be a socialist meant to be a human, to affirm that there was more to life than the brutish quest for coin. Not just wages, but dignity. Not just bread, but roses too.
Or, as Mamdani’s first campaign for state assembly put it – “roti and roses”.
Today, just blocks away from the Forward Building is the New York office of the Democratic Socialists of America. Mamdani joined the group in 2017, and it continues to be his political home. The thick culture the DSA created – of picket lines and soccer leagues, educational lectures and political canvasses and dating nights – recalls that of its socialist forbearers. Over the last eight years, it has also built a formidable political machine. The DSA launched Mamdani’s bids for state assembly, then for mayor. When it came to door-knocking, they were his army.