Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani reacts after winning the 2025 New York City Mayoral race, at an election night rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, Nov. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

In politics, people talk about the Overton Window — the range of ideas society deems acceptable to discuss in public. It shifts with time. And over the past 15 years, no form of hate has moved more dramatically from taboo to tolerance than antisemitism.

After World War II, antisemitic tropes in the United States largely lived on the margins — muttered in extremist circles, scribbled in pamphlets, and later echoed in chatrooms on the Dark Web. But somewhere between the rise of “The Squad,” the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, and the transformation of identity politics into a hierarchy of victimhood on the left and a mirror-image grievance culture on parts of the populist right, the world’s oldest hatred has been repackaged for the modern age.

What once cost you credibility in public life now earns applause, retweets, and primetime airtime.

Antisemitism didn’t vanish — it adapted.

From the Margins to the Megaphone

The shift began before “The Squad,” but the rise of these antisemitic and anti-Israel members of Congress marked a turning point — the first-time open hostility toward Israel, and by extension the vast majority of Jews, could be celebrated as moral courage from the House floor.

When Ilhan Omar (D-MN) tweeted that Israel had “hypnotized the world” and that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” she didn’t face moral reckoning. In 2019, Congress responded with a diluted resolution condemning all hatred — an “all lives matter” moment for antisemitism.

Rather than directly condemning antisemitism, Democratic Party leaders blurred it into abstraction — because calling it out was politically inconvenient. It was a watershed: the moment the Democratic Party signaled that antisemitic rhetoric, if veiled as “anti-Zionism,” was tolerable.

When Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and others began claiming that Jewish sovereignty itself was oppression, they weren’t shunned — they were lionized as purported truth-tellers. The moral vocabulary of the left, once rooted in universal rights, morphed into a simplistic hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed.

Within that framework, Jews — a historically persecuted people — were recast as “white colonizers.” It was an ideological coup: turning the survivors of genocide and mass expulsions from Arab lands into the villains of the story.

The Far Right Joins the Chorus

As the progressive left mainstreamed antisemitism in the name of “justice,” the “anti-woke” right embraced its own version in the name of “nationalism” and “America First.” The parallels to the antisemitic 1930s isolationists — Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin — are unmistakable.

Conspiracy theories that merely a decade ago belonged largely to the far-left now circulate freely among populist conservatives. Tucker Carlson, once a self-styled defender of Israel, now amplifies Holocaust minimizers and open antisemites, people praising figures who idolize Hitler and Stalin, while blaming “Jewish influence” for Western decline.

They aren’t alone. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Candace Owens have trafficked in antisemitic memes, “globalist” conspiracies, and blood-libel tropes that would have ended political careers a decade ago.

And on the other side, far-left pundits like Mehdi Hasan — apparently unaware of the horseshoe theory — find themselves surprised to be sharing these same figures’ social media talking points. In their mirror-image hatreds, the far right and far left converge, using the same ancient scapegoat to explain modern grievances.

Enter Mamdani: The Product of a Shifted Window

This moral drift explains how someone like Zohran Mamdani could become mayor of New York City — a city that is 12% Jewish.

Mamdani blames police brutality on Israel, claiming “the laces of the NYPD’s boots are tied by the IDF.” He instructs fellow socialists to link every domestic “austerity issue” to the US–Israel alliance — as if the 0.04 percent of the Federal budget connected to Israel explains rent prices in Brooklyn.

That isn’t criticism. It’s scapegoating — the oldest antisemitic reflex, wrapped in today’s language of social justice.

And the most revealing part is that it doesn’t hurt him politically. The use of antisemitic tropes no longer disqualifies candidates; it energizes them. The Overton Window has moved so far that such rhetoric isn’t scandalous — it’s strategy.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

For Jews, this moment carries an echo. We’ve seen it before — in Warsaw, Minsk, Baghdad, and Tripoli — cities that were once over 30% Jewish and home to flourishing Jewish life. In each, the pattern was the same: what was once unspeakable became debatable; what was debatable became acceptable.

Within a generation, those cities became Judenrein — emptied of Jews — not by accident but by political design. It always began with talk: the idea that the Jews were powerful, disloyal, manipulative. That “the people” were suffering because of them. Then talk became action.

Americans flatter themselves that it can’t happen in the USA — that its institutions and pluralism are too strong. But Overton Windows don’t move because of evil people; they move because of complacent or cowardly ones.

The Moral Drift

Today, antisemitism doesn’t always come in jackboots. It travels in hashtags and soundbites. It calls itself “humanitarian,” “anti-imperialist,” “decolonial.” It thrives in elite universities, “progressive” city councils, and digital echo chambers — and on the identitarian right, where “replacement theory” and “globalist” conspiracies recycle the same poison in a different accent.

It comes dressed as virtue and camouflaged in the moral language of the age.

That’s why the 2019 “all hate” resolution mattered. It wasn’t merely a procedural dodge — it was a moral surrender. It told every rising activist and politician: if your antisemitism is ideological enough, you can survive it — even thrive. And thrive, they have.

Drawing the Line

There’s a Jewish lesson older than America itself: when societies decide antisemitism is acceptable — even in coded form — they do not remain moral or safe for long.

Yes, the Overton Window has shifted. But it can shift back — if we make antisemitism, in every form, politically toxic again. That means calling out the right’s conspiracies and the left’s moral inversions with equal force.

History has already shown us where silence leads. The only question is whether we recognize the warning signs — or once again pretend the rhetoric is “complicated.”

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.