The Return of the ‘Zionist’ Slur

By Daniel Schatz

Sunday, August 30, 2026

 

When I first heard Zohran Mamdani rail against Israel and Zionism, I did not think of the war in Gaza. I thought of Poland in 1968. The political language I grew up hearing about from my parents and grandparents — the language that helped drive them from their country of birth — was suddenly echoing through New York, decades later and an ocean away.

 

My family was among the thousands of Jews forced out of Communist Poland little more than two decades after the Holocaust. They were harassed, humiliated, stripped of their place in society, and ultimately driven from the country for no reason other than being Jewish. The regime never called its campaign antisemitic. It called it anti-Zionist. That distinction made much of what followed possible.

 

After Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967, the Soviet Union and nearly all of its Warsaw Pact allies severed relations with Israel. In Poland, Communist leader Władysław Gomułka warned that Polish Jews celebrating Israel’s victory constituted a “fifth column.” When student protests erupted the following year, “Zionists” became the convenient enemy within. The significance of that word is difficult to overstate. Poland’s Jewish population then numbered around 30,000 in a country of 32 million. Yet government propaganda transformed the small number of Jews who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust into a network of supposedly disloyal cosmopolitans whose true allegiance lay elsewhere.

 

The word “Zionist” rapidly lost any precise meaning. A Zionist was disloyal, cosmopolitan, and connected to foreign interests: someone whose real loyalty supposedly belonged to another country. Then came the machinery. Tens of thousands of meetings were organized in factories, universities, and even sports clubs, adopting “anti-Zionist” resolutions. Jews were expelled from jobs, universities, and government institutions. They effectively had their citizenship revoked and were forced to emigrate.

 

In Łódź, Jewish journalists were dismissed as “Zionists,” while physicians were asked for baptism certificates. Communist propaganda recycled material from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic book. Within months, Jewish communal life in a city that had once been one of Europe’s great centers of Jewish culture was devastated, and the city was “Judenrein” — cleansed of Jews.

 

People were interrogated, humiliated, and professionally destroyed. Friends and colleagues stopped speaking to them. Families that had survived the Holocaust were branded foreigners in the country they considered home. Some could not bear it. Mieczysław Rakowski, later the last prime minister of Communist Poland, recalled a letter sent to Gomułka by a woman in Kraków with two sons and a sick husband. “Do me a favor and send some poison capsules,” she wrote. “I have no strength to live anymore. I do not want my sons to spend their whole lives paying for having a Jewish father.”

 

Jozef Dajczgewand, one of the leaders of the March 1968 student protests and now a resident of Sweden, was arrested that month, tortured, and sentenced to two years in prison. In an interview for this article, he recalled that during one interrogation, police forced him to undress while screaming “f*ing Jew.”

 

“I closed my eyes,” he told me, “wondering for a second if it was Poles who committed these acts or the same Nazis who had persecuted my parents.” When he emerged from prison, most of his friends had already fled. “I could feel the echoes of history,” he said. He ended up leaving, too.

 

The victims were made stateless. Their possessions and savings were confiscated through humiliating exit procedures. Most had never belonged to a Jewish or Zionist organization. Many had never been to Israel. But that did not matter: Their Jewishness made them suspect.

 

My parents and grandparents were among those forced to start again somewhere else. And throughout it all, the authorities insisted they had nothing against Jews. They were merely fighting Zionists.

 

That was the genius — and the obscenity — of the word.

 

The political vocabulary developed behind the Iron Curtain did not disappear when Communism collapsed. It spread through the developing world and the international left, eventually finding a home in parts of Western academia and progressive politics. Moscow and its allies helped popularize the idea of Zionism as racist, imperialist, colonialist, and fascist — an enemy not only of Palestinians but of progressive humanity itself. Communist propaganda compared Zionism with Nazism. In 1975, the Soviet bloc joined Arab and developing countries to provide the majority for the United Nations resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Anti-Zionism had become more than a position on the Middle East. In parts of the global left, it was becoming an identity.

 

The echoes of that time are difficult to miss today when Israel is again described as imperialist and colonialist. It is compared with apartheid South Africa and, with increasing frequency, Nazi Germany. Jews — the descendants of one of history’s most persecuted peoples — are recast as privileged oppressors. Palestinian violence is increasingly described not primarily as violence to be judged on its own terms but as “resistance” by a colonized people. Parts of the left have even found common cause with Islamist movements whose views on women, homosexuality, religious freedom, and liberal democracy contradict almost everything progressives claim to believe.

 

Zohran Mamdani did not invent this worldview, but he speaks its language fluently. In his 2017 rap song “Salaam,” Mamdani gave a shout-out to the “Holy Land Five,” leaders of a charity whose officials were convicted of providing material support to Hamas. During his 2025 New York City mayoral campaign, he declined to affirm Israel’s right to exist specifically as a Jewish state. Asked about the slogan “globalize the intifada,” Mamdani initially refused to condemn it. And at a Democratic Socialists of America gathering in 2023, Mamdani explained why activists needed to make Palestine “hyper-local” for Americans: “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” With that sentence, Israel ceases to be simply a distant country whose policies he opposes. It becomes an explanation for injustice in New York. Perceived American police brutality and racism are folded into the indictment of the Jewish state.

 

For someone whose family lived through Poland in 1968, this mechanism feels unnervingly familiar: Stretch the meaning of “Zionist” until it becomes synonymous with “oppressor,” then, you can sort the Jews themselves. The “good Jew” is the Jew who condemns Israel loudly enough, repudiates Zionism, and demonstrates that his Jewish identity presents no obstacle to progressive politics. Such Jews are eagerly presented as proof that anti-Zionism cannot possibly become antisemitic.

 

The Jew who refuses that test gets different treatment. If Israel forms part of his family history, religious consciousness, or understanding of Jewish personhood, he is increasingly expected to explain himself. If he calls himself a Zionist, what may be a central element of his identity is transformed from a political belief open to disagreement into a moral stain. Once a political culture starts sorting Jews into acceptable and unacceptable kinds, history shows us we need to pay attention.

 

Mamdani is not alone. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed, and progressive media figures such as Hasan Piker share much of this worldview. Bernie Sanders’s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s enthusiastic support for Mamdani has helped move a politics once largely confined to the activist left closer to the Democratic mainstream.

 

This summer produced a pointed warning. On July 23, New York Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, publicly addressed Mamdani. New York’s Jews, she said, did not merely need police protection. They needed leaders to stop rhetoric that “demonizes Jews and the Jewish state and helps create the climate in which threats and violence flourish.”

 

Less than a month later, violence entered her own synagogue. During Shabbat services a few weeks ago, a man disrupted the congregation, assaulted a congregant and a security guard, and damaged synagogue property. He was charged with assault and criminal mischief as hate crimes. Buchdahl had not been alone in raising the alarm; days earlier, ten New York rabbis had met Mamdani at City Hall. They raised the recent stabbing of a Jewish New Yorker and their concern that rhetoric surrounding Israel was increasingly spilling over onto Jews in New York.

 

There is no evidence that the synagogue attacker, or the man charged in the earlier stabbing, acted because of anything Mamdani said. That is not the point. Political leaders help set the boundaries of prejudice. They determine which ideas remain shameful and which become part of ordinary political conversation.

 

My family’s story taught me where that can lead. Poland’s antisemitic campaign did not begin with thousands of Jews standing at railway stations holding one-way travel documents. It began with words — in speeches, newspapers, university campuses, and political debates. A political movement discovered that it could say things about “Zionists” that would have sounded uglier if it had simply said “Jews.”

 

Then a colleague stopped saying hello, a journalist lost his job, and a professor disappeared from his university.

 

I do not believe Jewish New Yorkers are about to be expelled from their city. The danger today is subtler, and therefore easier to ignore: An old prejudice is being recast in a new moral vocabulary. Hostility toward Zionism is presented not merely as permissible, but as virtuous — and Jews are increasingly expected to prove their virtue by joining in.

 

History rarely announces that it is repeating itself. Sometimes it just swaps out the words.