As the Smears Go Passing By

Adams, Mamdani, and Antisemitism

Eric Adams visits the Lubavitcher rebbe’s grave

The New York Times reported last night that Zohran Mamdani is trying to put distance between himself and the “globalize the intifada” controversy. This comes after Eric Adams sat for an interview with Israeli journalist Neria Kraus, where he asked, “Do you think Mamdani is an antisemite?” And responded, “Yes, I do,” before being unable to pronounce “intifada.” (It sounded like he was accusing Mamdani of wanting to “globalize the frittata,” an agenda which is heartily endorsed by particularly militant Italian nonnas.)

Longtime observers of New York politics will note a certain irony in Eric Adams attacking his opponent for antisemitism and even running on the absurd “EndAntiSemitism” ballot line. In 2021, Curtis Sliwa and the New York Post, without much else to go on, tried to make hay out of Adams’s connections to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whose antisemitism is unambiguous. In fact, Adams’s political career really began with a fiery defense of Farrakhan against black leaders he felt were too quick to denounce the Minister.

If Adams had not spent so much time talking up Israel (he once said he wanted to retire to the Golan Heights—go figure!) and cultivating relationships with Brooklyn’s Hasidic and Orthodox communities, he might be particularly vulnerable to charges of antisemitism. Consider the case of Reverend Herbert Daughtry, who Adams calls his “spiritual mentor” and who encouraged him as a young man to join the NYPD. Daughtry is a founding member of the National Black United Front, an organization formed in the late 1970s to unite Black Nationalist, left-wing, and Christian organizations under a single umbrella organization. Part of what made Daughtry a presence in New York politics was a strong stance on police brutality. But another part was clashing with Crown Heights’s Lubavitcher Hasidim, who Daughtry felt were being unfairly privileged by the city and state over their poor black neighbors. In 1978, The New York Post ran a cover with a photo of Daughtry and the quote, “We Will Get the Men in the Long Black Coats.” The article was about Daughtry’s initiative to set up community patrols to counter those of the Chabadniks that Daughtry said were harassing black youth. Daughtry claims, before God, that he never said it, and knowing the Post, perhaps one should believe him. What he apparently said, was, “When we organize our patrol, and men meet men, we will see what the people in the long Black coats will do.” But this was just the beginning of many imputations of antisemitism for the preacher that continued throughout the 1980s, when Adams would’ve been under his wing, and up to the 1991 conflagration in Crown Heights.

Daughtry had so many allegations of antisemitism that in 1997 he wrote an entire book to rebut them, No Monopoly On Suffering : Blacks and Jews in Crown Heights (and elsewhere). The title and the foreword by Cornel West would incline you to believe this was a call for solidarity and a recognition of shared suffering. While it does hit those notes from time to time, it’s largely dedicated to bitter complaints about Mayor Ed Koch, the Hasidim, and the media. It reproduces dozens of angry letters to the New York Post and Marty Peretz’s New Republic. While Daughtry emphasizes his positive relationship with many Jews—there is a chapter entitled “My Personal Experience with Jews”—a sensitive or skeptical reader might also detect some of those old “tropes:” imputations of Jewish money, manipulation, and media control cowing black power. For my part, I’ll just say: it’s not extremely sensitive to the history of antisemitic rhetoric. And if you think events of 30 years ago and more are water under the bridge, think again. As recently as 2016, Daughtry expressed some bitter thoughts about the riots in Crown Heights:

Twenty-five years ago, on August 19, 1991, Crown Heights experienced several days of what some Hassidic and some white leaders call “a riot” and what some leaders call “a rebellion.”… A quarter of a century later, there is still tension at the grassroots level, and some of the same problems still exist. Some independent Black leaders publicly complain that the Hassidim are increasing their power and authority and expanding their territory and still receiving preferential treatment. There is talk of progress by the old leadership with a couple of new faces. They point to marching together in the West Indian Day Parade, having picnics, and walking the streets in casual conversations. An African American columnist pointed to youthful Hassidim, saying, “Hey Bro, I like your Fedora,” as an indication of progress.
I am reminded of a quote from the 1940s. There was a discussion of whites and Blacks cooperating. The author said, “In white and Black’s cooperation, Blacks generally end up cooing and whites operating.” It may be applicable to Crown Heights. Blacks end up with cordialities, and the Hassidim owning and controlling. Blacks end up smiling, and the Hassidim end up conniving.
It is always the Hassidim’s side of the story that is told. I attended a press conference called by Borough President Eric Adams to express unity of all religions. It was the reaction to churches which had been set afire. The Jewish leaders who were there insisted upon making reference to the Crown Heights’ unrest – always posturing themselves as the innocent victims.

A lot of Jews may not particularly care for the Hasidim, and grant some of Daughtry’s points, but most Jews will feel a bit queasy about the comments about a riot that attacked Hasidim being a “rebellion” (an intifada? I kid.) or their fellow Jews being called “controlling,” “conniving,” and “posturing themselves as innocent victims.” It tends to get our hackles up. It’s worth noting that Mamdani, for a relative newcomer, is way better at not sounding a little antisemitic, probably because he actually isn’t.

My point here is not to make a tu quoque about black antisemitism and thereby raise an old and divisive issue, but more to observe how much the city has changed. Adams comes from a post-Black Power, nationalist political tradition that once viewed Jewish power in the city, from the United Federation of Teachers Strike in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968 down to Ed “All blacks are Antisemites” Koch and then Crown Heights, as an opposing bloc to their own political and social aspirations. They viewed themselves as another ethnic succession in city politics like the Irish replacing the “natives,” and then the Italians and Jews replacing the Irish. As Mara Gay wrote in the Times, Adams comes from a civic culture that’s more working class than the genteel Harlem political tradition embodied by Adam Clayton Powell, Charlie Rangel, Percy Sutton, and Mayor David Dinkins, the last of whom studiously avoided confrontations with Jews by denouncing Farrakhan, much to the irritation of young activists like Adams. But today working-class black New York is aging, and in many cases, leaving, under pressure from gentrification. Back in 2021, Erroll Louis hailed Adams’s coming victory as “a high tide of Black political power in New York.” But the tide is going out. Last year, Louis wrote:

…a steady out-migration of Black New Yorkers means the community’s current political ascendancy, decades in the making, will likely wane — and perhaps evaporate — in years to come. That’ll require new ways of thinking about how to build economic and electoral clout.

One way, Adams’s way, is to ally closely with other members of Old New York, like the Orthodox and Hasidic Communities of Brooklyn, who may not be shrinking, but are also competing for space and community control with what one might call the gentrifier class. Daughtry complained about special police protection given to Menachem Mendel Schneerson while his protégé Adams regularly visits the late rebbe’s grave. Imagine: the children of Daughtrys and the children of Schneersons, marching arm in arm against an influx of they/them baristas. Moshiach is here indeed.

There’s much more to say here. I haven’t touched on Israel and Palestine—Daughtry’s NBUF, coming from a Third Worldist and anti-imperialist milieu, was once quite pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist—nor dealt with the fact that two mayoral candidates, now bitter opponents, come out of the Pan-African tradition. But they have very different ideas of how a multiethnic New York should be governed. Adams believes in a New York of ethnic blocs of jostling but concordant identity politics that is not allergic to Zionism in the final analysis—after all, what is Israel but a big Jewish neighborhood?—while Mamdani believes in a model of universal, cosmopolitan citizenship. But I’ll have to deal with that in a future essay on “post-colonial New York.”