Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and now mayor-elect of New York City, has made his political identity inseparable from opposition to what he calls Zionism. He has characterized Israel as a settler-colonial project and demanded the United States end its support. He has accused Israel of genocide. On November 4, he became the most prominent American official yet to make this worldview his governing creed.
His win cannot be understood merely as another data point in the story of “rising antisemitism.” To grasp its meaning, we need a broader frame—what we at the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) call the libel-cycle: a recurring civilizational pattern in which anti-Jewish libels spread through society, generate moral hysteria, and rapidly recode entire ideological systems into engines of anti-Jewish meaning.
These race libels—defamatory accusations leveled at Jews or other minorities—are not simply lies or misinformation. They are social technologies: They spread like wildfire, ignite moral certainty, and reshape institutions in their path. Their power does not come from proof, but from repetition, outrage, and a totalizing logic that shuts out contradiction.
The persecution of Leo Frank—a Jewish factory manager falsely convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl in Georgia in 1913, and subsequently lynched—gave rise to the Anti-Defamation League. Its name is a reminder that defamation and racism are never separate forces but mutually reinforcing.
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