Saturday, August 29, 2026
From Ian:
Leading Sephardic & Mizrahi Organizations Challenge New York Magazine’s “Habibi City” Over Erasure of Middle Eastern Jews
Leading Sephardic & Mizrahi Organizations Challenge New York Magazine’s “Habibi City” Over Erasure of Middle Eastern Jews
What Zionism actually is to usBrendan O'Neill: The disgusting bigotry of blaming Israel for anti-Semitism
Our communities lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for over 2,500 years, before the emergence of Islam. In the twentieth century, close to one million Jews were driven from the Arab and Muslim world, frequently under laws that criminalized Zionism itself. In countries throughout the Arab world Zionism was made a capital offense, over 3,000 Jews were imprisoned, and Jews were stripped of citizenship and property as “Zionists”; across the region, families were dispossessed, imprisoned, or forced to flee under duress. In the political Zionism of the 20th century, we asserted our own indigeneity after living for millennia as second-class and, finally, exiled citizens of the lands of our birth. The movement your feature files alongside xenophobia and Islamophobia is the reason hundreds of thousands of those refugees had somewhere to go, and the reason their descendants, today the majority of Israel’s Jewish population, exist as communities at all. To renounce Zionism as the condition of belonging to a SWANA community is to demand that Jews disavow our own survival. Being Jewish or Zionist is not in opposition to being from a geographic region. For most of us, the two are how we are still here.
The cuisine your feature celebrates makes the point vividly. Food is one of the truest records a people keeps of where it has been. The dishes in your pages were also carried out of Baghdad, Sana’a, Cairo, and Casablanca by refugees who left with little else and they survive as living traditions rather than museum pieces because those refugees had a country to carry them to. Your food coverage goes further still: it prints, without comment, a featured restaurant’s menu map on which Israel does not appear at all, retitled “Discover Palestine,” and it refers in the magazine’s own editorial voice to “the land mass currently called Israel.” It reports, with evident satisfaction from one interviewee, that Israeli-owned restaurants are now retreating behind the euphemism “Mediterranean” some, by your own account, after vandalism. A feature devoted to the pride of naming oneself openly treats the return of Jews to concealment as a development to be savored. That is the second moral inversion.
The label “Arab Jew”
Your feature applies the label “Arab Jew” without qualification. Most Mizrahi Jews reject it and in current usage it functions largely to sever Jewish identity from Israel. The Tunisian-born sociologist and philosopher Albert Memmi answered the label half a century ago, responding to Muammar Gaddafi’s offer to welcome Jews back as “Arabs like us” after they had been brutally ethnically cleansed. He acknowledged the nostalgia the phrase evokes, then wrote: “We would have liked to be Arab Jews. If we abandon the idea, it is because over the centuries the Moslem Arabs systematically prevented its realization by their contempt and cruelty.” The identity was refused to us when we lived in Arab lands. It is now conferred on us in New York, without our consent, because it is politically convenient: an “Arab Jew” is a Jew whose story can be told without Israel. The great majority of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews were never asked whether we accept the label. Instead, your writers located the small minority who embrace it, presented them as representative, and left the rest of us to discover that our identity had been defined by others on our behalf. That is not inclusion. It is a curated exception, deployed to suggest the community has been consulted when it has not – erasure presenting itself as representation.
October 7 as a date without victims
In your feature, October 7th appears repeatedly and always as a calendar marker for what came after it, never as an event with victims of its own. It was carried out by Hamas, an organization whose founding charter is openly genocidal, calling for the destruction of Israel and invoking Islamic scripture commanding the killing of Jews, and whose record of violence runs in every direction: against Israelis in massacre and hostage-taking, and against Palestinians themselves, from the executions of political rivals in its 2007 seizure of Gaza to its ongoing torture and killing of dissidents. On October 7th, 2023 some 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 251 taken hostage, communities were burned, and sexual violence was documented – none of it acknowledged, even in passing, in thousands of words that date an entire cultural renaissance to that morning. Your readers might never learn that among the towns invaded that day including Ofakim, Sderot, Netivot are some of the most heavily Mizrahi communities in Israel: descendants of the very refugees from Morocco, Iraq, and Yemen whose food and music fill your pages. The people of the region were both among the murdered and among the murdered’s mourners, and your feature could not spare them a single sentence. A “SWANA community” whose “shared beliefs” in anti-Zionism require total silence about Jewish suffering and about the genocidal intent and movement that inflicted the tragedy of October 7th is not practicing solidarity with Palestinians. It is practicing antisemitism. That is the third moral inversion.
“We are not asking to be tolerated as exceptions to an ideological rule. We are asking to be recognized as what we are: peoples of the region.”
What we ask
We are not asking to be tolerated as exceptions to an ideological rule. We are asking to be recognized as what we are: peoples of the region. We ask that New York Magazine acknowledge that its framing excludes the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa except on ideological terms, and renders the region’s other non-Muslim peoples nearly invisible; that future coverage of SWANA communities include Mizrahi and Sephardic voices as we actually are, which for the great majority of us means Zionist, alongside the other erased non-Muslim indigenous voices of the region; and that your editors meet with representatives of the undersigned organizations to discuss how that happens.
In a suit and tie on one of his hours-long, soul-eating livestreams, Piker said that ‘if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel mind you, but against American Jews’. There it is. Plainly put. In all its neo-fascist horror. If you’re an American Jew and you’re pro-Israel, you risk attack. Your alignment with that ‘genocidal’ entity is putting your own life and limb at risk. How about being a good Jew and saying ‘Fuck Israel’?Jonathan Tobin: El-Sayed’s antisemitism is the issue; not Hasan Piker
Even for the Dem elites who cosied up to Piker in the demented belief that he would breathe life into their knackered brand, his ‘What do you expect, Jews?’ schtick has proven too much. Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat and House Minority leader, didn’t hold back. ‘The malicious claim that American Jews are inviting violence against themselves is dangerous and anti-Semitic’, he said. He continued: ‘There is zero justification for threats against the safety of our Jewish brothers and sisters at a moment of rising hate.’ Even Abdul El-Sayed – the Dem candidate for the US Senate in Michigan who’s been rubbing Piker like a genie’s lamp of stardust and ‘authenticity’ – has distanced himself from Piker’s mad comments.
I have no sympathy with these arse-covering Dems. For if they can hear and read, they would know that the pondscum idea that Jews invite violence upon themselves by backing Israel has been a rancid belief of the Islamo-left for years. Others who are a tad more morally sophisticated – ‘tad’ being the operative word – don’t berate Jews themselves but instead say the Jewish State is the problem. As that most one-eyed basher of Israel – Owen Jones – said in defence of Piker: ‘It is an obvious undeniable fact that Israel’s actions are fuelling anti-Semitism.’ When a middle-class canceller says something is ‘obvious’ and ‘undeniable’, it’s usually neither.
Let’s put this evil bullshit to bed once and for all. First, as already mentioned, the descendants of other nations that have committed far greater crimes than Israel’s are not being attacked day and night – why not? Next, explain this: why did violent Israelophobia – which is just Jew hatred in drag – precede what you call ‘the genocide’ but which most normal people call the Israel-Hamas War? It’s almost as if Jews in Europe and America are being attacked for the goddamn racist hell of it rather than because of the ‘Gaza genocide’. Finally: what happened to the great woke sin of victim-blaming? Why is it victim-blaming to say blacks invite racism upon themselves through their ‘bad behaviour’ but fine to spout the same regressive drivel about Jews? Singling Jews out for a species of moral judgement that is applied to no other race on Earth – if only there was a word for that…
Let’s cut to the chase: it isn’t Israel’s behaviour that is endangering the world’s Jews – it’s the Islamo-left’s lies about Israel’s behaviour. It is their treacharous bastardisation of a war as a ‘genocide’, and their libellous branding of civilian casualties as ‘baby killing’, that has resuscitated the wheezing zombie of Jew hatred. The desecrators of synagogues and destroyer of Jewish lives have all yelled ‘Genocide’ and ‘Child murder’ these past three years. Their violent hatred was fuelled not by Israel’s war against the Islamofascists of Hamas but by the Islamo-left’s viral, fascist-adjacent misinformation about that war.
Let’s put it like this. I support Israel. I call myself a Zionist. I don’t think anything like a genocide has been committed in Gaza. I want Hamas to be destroyed. And yet I have never been racially abused on the streets or seen any of my cultural institutions protested or graffitied. We all know why: I’m not a Jew.
Indeed, the trouble goes beyond El-Sayed’s own long record of antisemitic positions and troubling comments about violence against Jews, even while continuing to claim that he wants to protect them.
Over the course of the last year, growing numbers of Democrats and liberal pundits have embraced a raft of blood libels about Israel and the Jews. The big lies that Israel has perpetrated a “genocide” in Gaza, imposed starvation there or is an “apartheid state” rather than the Middle East’s only democracy, have been widely embraced not only by extremist podcasters like Piker, but by vast numbers of Democratic officeholders and many, if not most, liberal pundits at supposedly respectable publications and broadcast networks.
Democrats have accepted the centerpiece argument of El-Sayed’s primary campaign about stopping the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby from “buying” Congress as a legitimate argument. Many, if not most, are no longer willing to accept campaign donations from it even if they remain supporters of the Jewish state.
Democrats may think that Piker’s comments justifying violence against Jews for supporting Israel go too far, which is embarrassing for them because he is linked to one of their main midterm hopefuls. But many, if not most, agree with the podcaster and his friend, El-Sayed, that there is something unwholesome or even wrong for Jews and other like-minded Americans to organize and seek to use the same tools employed by all advocacy groups to persuade voters to support their position.
The fact is that hatred for Israel—and the targeting of mainstream liberals for being insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state—has been a decisive factor in victory after victory in 2026 primaries for candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America or their allies.
Embracing blood libels
Democrats, including their leaders, like Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who are supposedly pro-Israel and concerned about antisemitism, have already demonstrated that they are willing to tolerate it if it comes out the mouth of a fellow Democrat like El-Sayed. Not even his invocation of traditional tropes—singling out Jews for opprobrium by mainstreaming blood libels about Israel, and claims that Jews are using their wealth to manipulate policy against American interests—was enough to get them to disavow his candidacy. Nor did his rationalization of a terror attack on a Michigan synagogue.
Nor should we have expected them to, since such hateful discourse has long since been normalized among political liberals in the post-Oct. 7 world, where Israel is now the main focus of hatred from the left. Anti-Zionism, which seeks to strip Jews of rights that no one thinks to wish to deny any other people, is indistinguishable from antisemitism. But it is now kosher among Democrats, rather than, as it used to and should be, a belief that should be relegated to the fever swamps of the far-left and the far-right.
Seen from that perspective, Piker is not a distraction from the real issues or a red herring being highlighted by Republicans to sabotage a Democratic candidate. He is entirely relevant to a key issue being debated across the country.
The willingness of Democrats to let their party be hijacked by a far-left faction and its allies whose hatred for Israel and the Jews is at the core of their woke belief system is the real issue. In so allowing—whether out of moral cowardice or a conviction that partisan loyalties and opposing Trump and the Republicans is more important than fighting antisemitism—they have created a moral dilemma for themselves.
The only way to salve their consciences is not by criticizing Piker or persuading El-Sayed to distance himself from him. It’s by disavowing El-Sayed and every other antisemitic candidate who camouflages his extremism by playing the part of a loyal Democrat who seeks to defeat Trump and all his works and allies.
If they won’t do that, they should stop pretending they care about opposing Jew-hatred and simply embrace their party’s new identity as the political expression of modern American antisemitism.
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