In the midst of the smallness and hideousness of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” as well as the xenophobia, racial profiling and lack of due process in the immigration raids and deportations, compounded by the savagery of the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran, we have a story that is inspirational and heartwarming.
Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist, won the Democratic primary in New York City last week. If he wins the mayoralty in November, Mamdani will be the first Muslim mayor, as well as the first mayor of South Asian descent, in the history of Gotham.
Despite the lies that he is anti-Semitic, Zohran Mamdani has received much love from Jews and New Yorkers of all ethnic, religious and racial backgrounds.
He is a uniter, as a lovely piece by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times’ Sunday Opinion section demonstrated. I was touched by the photo of Mamdani and Brad Lander, comptroller of New York and a mayoral candidate himself, with the latter gazing at Mamdani in adoration.
Goldberg’s op-ed reminded me of a piece I wrote for Thrive Global in Aug. 2021, “Shalom, Salaam and Respect,” in which I discussed my friendship with my high school classmate Isam Kaoud, who happens to be of Arabic descent.
In that piece, I discussed how when we elevate language, including the letters of the alphabet, we can generate sparks of love that can lead us to peace.
Goldberg opened her piece with a discussion of a Palestinian eatery in the city that hosted a free Shabbat dinner.
Food and literature are two forms of soft power that can help us bridge seeming, cultural barriers, points that I also made in that Thrive Global article.
As we saw in the Democratic primary in New York, there is more that links us than divides us if we open our minds to the prospects of cross-cultural friendship.
Indeed, Lander, who is Jewish, and Mamdani cross-endorsed each other in the ranked choice primary election.
And it goes without saying that their friendship is nothing out of the ordinary in a city that has always embraced diversity and immigrants. New York is after all the home of Ellis Island.
As it turns out, Lander, like Senator Alex Padilla of California, was also manhandled by law enforcement, in Lander’s case, when he tried to stop officials from arresting immigrants in a courthouse.
We were all once strangers in a strange land, as Senator Adam Schiff recently pointed out in a speech decrying Trump’s mean-spirited budget bill that, if passed, will leave thousands without health care or food stamps or other forms of aid.
Yes, Jews were strangers in Egypt and Babylonia and many other places before some of us settled in this country, where we, like so many others, have found a welcome home.
Jews and Arabs, as I noted in “Shalom, Salaam and Respect,” share a great deal with each other. There is of course the shared geography in the holy land, from which many of our ancestors hail. There is also the deep familial tie in our ancestry, since you could argue that we are all sons and daughters of Abram, who founded Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
In addition, as I wrote in that 2021 piece for Thrive Global, there is also the etymological resonance between Jews and Arabs, whose names in Hebrew share the same three letters.
Interestingly, Zohran Mamdani’s first name sounds like the word, Zohar, which is the title of what is thought by many to be the most authoritative text in Jewish mysticism.
Zohar means the radiance, in Aramaic, if I am remembering correctly.
Perhaps, it is not surprising then that Zohran Mamdani glows with vitality, optimism and new ideas to fix the city’s ills.
He has plans to help New Yorkers with a freeze in rent and free buses and city owned grocery stores, among other issues that revolve around affordability.
And Mamdani has a very sunny disposition.
Not so Donald Trump, who continues to pour poison into our world and to stoke grievances.
He appeals to the lowest common denominator in some people by giving them permission to be a racist or a xenophobe or a violent person.
Those who do not think critically or who feel aggrieved sometimes fall for Trump’s bait, especially because fewer and fewer people seem to think critically any longer.
We do have a literacy crisis in this country, as well as the problems of misinformation, disinformation and lies that keep flooding the airwaves from Trump and his cronies.
But none of this, including the anti-Muslim slurs, stopped Zohran Mamdani from winning the Democratic primary in the New York mayoral race.
A former rap artist, Mamdani is a gifted speaker.
Not so Trump.
When Donald Trump names something, you know it falls victim to more than a little irony and at his expense.
He has dubbed the Israel-Iran war the “12-Day War.”
It is more than possible that someone whispered into Trump’s ear something about the Six-Day War, one that took place in 1967, and perhaps, with a little prodding, Trump pronounced the recent Israel-Iran conflict, which began on Friday the 13th, as the “12-Day War.”
He might think it nifty that it is double the number of days of the Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated Syria, Egypt, Jordan and others. Tragically, the reverberations of the Six-Day War are still felt to this day, particularly in terms of the problems of settlements, which are making it hard for the Palestinians to form their own state.
In the Six-Day War, Israel captured, among other territories, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza strip, and the eastern portions of Jerusalem, including the Old City. The Old City, of course, is home to the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, a remnant of the First and Second Temple, as well as the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, which rests atop the Temple Mount or what is also known as the Noble Sanctuary.
If I can return to Trump’s proclamation in naming the recent Israel-Iran conflict the “12-Day War,” neither this proclamation nor any other from Trump even remotely suggests the voice of God.
“Let there be light,” as we know, are the first words uttered by the Lord in the Bible, words that indeed produced light.
When God says something, it is so.
But when Trump says something, you can be sure that it carries no such force.
What it does carry is a reminder that we are all mortals and that we should all be modest and mindful that we are simply children or servants of God.
Despite his all-caps renderings of devotion to God and to peace, Trump is filled with little other than hatred.
His calls for peace or civility, scripted or unscripted, will never ring true, as I have written before.
One need only recall a tell-tale example from early in Trump’s political career when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” and still not lose any votes.
That hideous statement set the tone for Trump’s campaign, and his rhetoric of hatred persists, with his bragging about “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear facilities, as I discussed in my previous post.
Just about every thought, action and word out of Trump’s mouth is animated by violence, hatred and jealousy.
As I have written previously in pieces, such as my August 2017 essay in the HuffPost, “Donald Trump Is a Disgrace, But He Is Not Mentally Ill,” the solipsist in chief does not speak daggers in any Shakespearean sense. To state the obvious, Trump lacks the eloquence of Hamlet.
It is also the case that Trump has no irony detector.
He might think it clever that he has dubbed the Israel-Iran conflict the “12-Day War,” but he might want to be cautious about gloating over this coinage.
The biblical patriarch Jacob, whose name became Israel, famously had 12 sons, after whom the 12 tribes were named, and most of them disappeared millennia ago since the northern kingdom of Israel split from the southern kingdom of Judah and imploded.
Yes, 10 tribes or so are lost to history.
But, as some of us will recall, Cyrus, leader of Persia, an ancient civilization located primarily in what is now known as Iran, admired the Israelites and sent them back to the holy land to rebuild their temple after it had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar during the Babylonian exile.
Yes, Cyrus, like Zohran Mamdani, had vision and wanted to repair the world and strengthen people of an ethnic and religious background that was different from his own.
Cyrus was a healer, a man of peace.
Trump is not. He boasts that he would bomb Iran again.
As Bobby Dylan sings, “Sometimes, Satan comes as a man of peace.”
Most of the time, though, Satan comes as he is, a malevolent villain, who, as I have written before, spews chaos, seeks to divide and conquer, and brags about “obliterating” others.
We might recall that before God created the heavens and the earth, there was chaos in the world. It was a world devoid of form.
But God filled the void with love.
Let there be light.
And there was light.
Trump’s apparent coinage of the “12-Day War” means very little other than that he once again covets credit for something.
Without authorization from Congress or the U.N., he joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a war that for all its tactical virtuosity is leading many people in the streets of Tehran to continue to call for “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
Yes, there is the hope that moderates like Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, with their yearning to “liberalize” the country and sign a new nuclear deal, could prevail in time in Iran.
Yes, many Iranians have been enamored of American music and film and clothing and other aspects of our culture.
And, yes, a significant percentage of Iranians, a highly educated people, cannot stand the repression of the theocracy in their homeland.
Still, the repercussions of the war with Iran may be far from over, even if there is a cease-fire that is in place right now.
One cannot predict if there may be more bombings of other facilities, as Trump has threatened to do.
And Iran could still block off maritime traffic in the Straits of Hormuz and other water bodies in the Middle East, which would disrupt the world’s economy, already disrupted by Trump’s tariffs.
Supreme Leader Khamanei has still sounded defiant in proclaiming Iran’s “victory.”
We simply don’t know what will transpire in Iran partly because of the recklessness of Trump but also because of the harsh rhetoric and deep wounds suffered by the Islamic Republic.
All of this has distracted many from the situation in Gaza, where roughly 50 hostages still have not been returned, and where Palestinian civilians are suffering horribly every day, being shot at, as they trek for miles to get food, water and medicine.
Israel has not only altered its rules of engagement; according to a report in Haaretz, Israeli troops have been instructed to shoot at Gazans seeking humanitarian aid.
Netanyahu has denied this.
His denial notwithstanding, this is not the Israel I know.
For decades, the Israeli military has been one that does its very best to target with great precision the very terrorists who have committed crimes against Israel.
Consider how Israel tracked down the terrorists, who killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
Israel did everything possible not to kill any civilians or family members of the terrorists, as we might know from the Steven Spielberg movie Munich.
And it is true that Israel showed exceptional intelligence in targeting Iran’s military leaders and nuclear scientists, though many Iranian civilians have also been killed by Israeli bombs, including a reported 71 people in Evin Prison, which has housed political dissidents.
As for Hamas, there is no doubt that it has historically committed double war crimes, by using civilian shields thereby endangering the Gazan people; and by firing rockets at or massacring Israeli civilians, as Hamas did on October 7, 2023.
But the people of Gaza, who are walking for hours to get food, water and medicine, are no threat to Israel.
72 Palestinians in Gaza reportedly died from Israeli strikes just the other night.
And as writers for the AP reported in a piece published in the L.A. Times, “More than 500 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded while seeking food since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began distributing aid in the territory about a month ago, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a seemingly opaque organization that is run by American contractors, replaced the International Red Cross and other entities, which were previously overseeing the aid deliveries.
In the L.A. Times piece, published in the June 29 print edition of the paper, Doctors Without Borders this past Friday called the aid delivery taking place at this time “a slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
As I noted earlier, Netanyahu, as well as his defense minister, Israel Katz, denounced the report in Haaretz as “malicious falsehoods designed to defame” the military.
I would agree with Zohran Mamdani that Netanyahu has committed war crimes.
In a warped way, Netanyahu, in questioning the patriotism of the media in Israel, was taking a cue from Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who criticized CNN and the New York Times and others, when they reported on a Defense Intelligence Agency initial assessment that the U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities may have set back Iran’s nuclear program only a few months.
Whether we are talking about the horrific massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza or the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, we know that we are hearing lies and distortions from Trump and Netanyahu, who, as I have written before, has been in power too long.
Trump can double the number of days in the Six-Day War, but he cannot stop the truth, which is that in many respects the repercussions of the Six-Day War are being felt to this day. And, sadly, I suspect that the same will be true for some time as it concerns the Israel-Iran War, with again the possibilities of disruption to the world’s economy, maritime traffic in the Middle East, and other fateful consequences.
With Iranians railing in the streets against the “Big Satan” and the “Little Satan,” it is clear that Trump can call the war anything he likes, but his words are lost, like so many of the tribes of Israel.
Still, I remain an optimist about the prospects for peace.
This is not because of anything that Trump proclaims or demands.
It is because of the mystical powers of language when it is elevated.
As I wrote in my Thrive Global piece, “Shalom, Salaam and Respect,” the sacred kinship of the letters of the alphabet can restore us to our roots as brothers and sisters in the Middle East, New York City and everywhere.
I am reminded that in ancient times, long before Islam, one of the major religions in Persia was Zoroastrianism.
It is more than possible that Zoroastrianism shares a root with the Zohar, a Jewish Kabbalistic text, both of which call forth the radiance, the light and the truth.
All of which is to say that the ancient Persians and the Israelites shared a lot in common during the days of Cyrus, and that brotherhood could be seen and heard in their shared language.
Today, we can see and hear that resonance with Zohran Mamdani, whose friendship with Brad Lander among others, tells me that some tribes, which were once perhaps lost, have been found. This also tells me that we can build a future together, a future of peace and affordability, of vitality, charm and imagination, where we share food and language, and where we glow with the radiance of the Zohar wherever we live.