Against Treating Antisemitism as Grounds for Identity-Based Policy: A Case for Universalism
Source: Bhaskar Sunkara. "Against the Politics of Communal Fear." October 2, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author argues that while antisemitism is a real problem worth taking seriously, New York City's new plan to fight it—along with the broader panic around it—risks making Jewish New Yorkers feel more afraid and more divided from their neighbors than the actual evidence warrants. He compares this to the 'Stop Asian Hate' movement, which he says overstated a sense of communal danger and pushed identity-based fixes instead of more effective universal solutions like better mental healthcare and public transit safety. His bottom line: the Left should respond to prejudice with policies that unite everyone, not ones that make people see their safety through the lens of ethnic or religious identity.
Conclusion
The Left should be skeptical of New York City's antisemitism initiative and similar identity-based policy responses, favoring instead universal solutions and a politics of shared humanity over communal fear and identitarian remedies.
Premises
- The city's antisemitism strategy outsources significant work to third-sector organizations and frames Jewish insecurity in ways that merit scrutiny rather than uncritical support.
- Historical precedent (the 'Stop Asian Hate' movement) shows that mobilizing around a single racial/ethnic identity in response to real violence can produce tautological remedies, salience bias, and irrational fear, while crowding out more effective universal solutions (e.g., better mental health care, public safety infrastructure).
- Statistical evidence on antisemitism (incident tallies, hate crime data, anxiety surveys) measures different phenomena and is often conflated to manufacture a sense of emergency, as seen in the ADL's 2021 audit where increases were partly attributable to expanded reporting partnerships rather than underlying behavioral change.
- Data on hard-right versus hard-left Americans (NORC research) shows antisemitic attitudes are concentrated on the hard right, while anti-Israel views are concentrated on the hard left—suggesting the current panic conflates legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and is being weaponized against Mamdani and the Left.
- Treating antisemitism as an eternal, structural threat (echoing Arendt's warning) is ahistorical, trivializes the actual history of pogroms and genocide, and paradoxically gives antisemitism an alibi by naturalizing it rather than treating it as a contingent political prejudice.
- There is no evidence of an organized antisemitic political movement capable of building anti-Jewish laws or structures of exclusion in the US; isolated acts of bigotry (e.g., from Nick Fuentes) do not constitute a mass movement threatening Jewish Americans' daily lives.
- Mamdani's own tactical and moral answer—that he is 'mayor for all New Yorkers'—exemplifies the superior universalist approach that resists communal siege narratives while still taking real discrimination seriously.
Assumptions
- Universal, class-based or structural solutions are generally more effective and politically healthier than identity-based or communal remedies.
- Public perception of threat (subjective fear) can be meaningfully distinguished from, and should be calibrated against, objective risk levels.
- Policy responses to prejudice should be proportionate to demonstrated structural threats rather than responsive to reported anxiety or incident counts alone.
- The political motivations behind amplifying antisemitism narratives (e.g., attacks on Mamdani, conflation with anti-Zionism) are partly strategic/cynical rather than purely good-faith concern.
- Comparing the current moment to historical persecution (pogroms, the Holocaust) is inappropriate given material differences in Jewish security and integration in contemporary America.
- Government-funded security and education initiatives tied to specific communal identities tend to reify and deepen identity-based thinking rather than reduce prejudice.