In sixth grade, my middle school scheduled its first dance for a Friday night during Sukkot. My family kept Shabbat and would spend the evening in our Sukkah, twin reasons why I couldn’t realize the quintessential teenage dream of swaying to top-40 beats in the cafeteria, chaperoned by history and Spanish teachers.
My mom suggested I invite another friend who couldn’t attend, a Muslim girl whose family observed the Jumma, or day of prayer, on Friday, to dinner in the Sukkah. Overcoming some middle-school trepidation, I invited her over — she’d become one of my closest friends.
We were similar in our differences, unable to attend Friday night dances or dispel all the assumptions our classmates might make. Our experience at our little Cary, North Carolina middle school mirrored a larger truth at the heart of the American experience: Jewish and Muslim safety and success — like those of all minority communities — are tightly bound together.
The Anti-Defamation League has lost sight of this lesson. In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City, the ADL announced a ‘Mamdani Monitor’ dedicated to cataloguing the mayor-elect’s every move. No such monitor exists for an American president who has asserted Jewish dual loyalty, staffed his administration with avowed anti-semites, described violent white supremacists as “very fine people” and pardoned convicted felons who stormed the capital clad in Nazi regalia.
Mamdani’s avowed anti-Zionism certainly puts him at odds with many of the 1.3 million Jewish New Yorkers he’ll represent. But conflating it with anti-semitism risks turning Jewish pain into a political football. And fearmongering attempts to turn the mayor-elect into an avatar of Jew hatred feed a rising tide of Islamophobia.
The year after my friend and I missed our middle school dance, my mom, a Conservative rabbi, took me and my brothers to a protest at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in response to Donald Trump’s first Muslim ban. She told us it was our duty as Jewish Americans to stand up for others and not to be bystanders when we saw oppression and discrimination happen in front of our eyes. There was never a question or doubt in my mind that keeping Jewish people safe meant protecting all minority groups.
In the past two years, in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, antisemitism and Islamophobia have proliferated like twin plagues, refitting well-worn and bigoted tropes to fit the devastating news from the region. While antisemites have slandered my community as wielding sinister global control, Islamophobes have caricatured Muslims who voiced genuine concern for millions of civilians suffering in Gaza as somehow motivated by violent or extremist sentiment. These bigoted assertions crumble in the face of dialogue and understanding. We can inoculate against antisemitism and Islamophobia with education and cross-cultural connections.
It pains me that some in my Jewish community are part of the problem. It has been heartbreaking to see legacy Jewish institutions stoke the flames of Islamophobia in this country. They seem motivated by the perverse logic that they can only secure the safety of Jewish Americans at the expense of our Muslim brothers and sisters, as if dignity were a zero-sum game. The actions of some Jewish institutions are exactly what I was raised to stand up against.
The week the ADL launched the ‘Mamdani Monitor,’ Tucker Carlson hosted neo-Nazi commentator Nick Fuentes for a chummy back and forth on one of America’s most popular podcasts. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and the ideological architect of the Trump presidency, rushed to Carlson’s defense. The month before that, the rancid, racist, sexist and deeply anti-Semitic messages of Young Republicans’ operatives came to light and the Vice President laughed it off. In the face of an ascendant racist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic right-wing movement, Jews can’t afford to ignore Islamophobia, much less feed into it.
We know that our struggle against hatred is intersectional at its core. The fight for equal rights for Jews and Muslims in this country is the fight for equal rights for all people in this country. My Judaism demands that I call out injustice wherever I see it, even when it comes from those with whom I share the same faith, culture and DNA. Rabbi Hillel rightly asks “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” but we can’t forget his next question: “If I am only for myself, what am I?” Jewish Americans cannot only be for ourselves in this moment or any moment. We must be upstanders for all.
