In 1894, Colonel Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew, was falsely accused of treason. The accusation was not justice - it was antisemitism wearing the robes of the state. A courageous writer, Émile Zola, stood up when almost no one else would. He wrote J’Accuse - “I accuse" - and forced a nation to look at what it had done.
Today, the Mayor of New York has turned the Jewish state, the Jewish people, into a collective Dreyfus. In the spirit of Zola, I say to you, Mr. Mayor:
J’accuse.
J’accuse you of calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “the architect of a horrific genocide" - a word chosen not for precision, but for its power to wound and to inflame.
J’accuse you of naming a number - of the dead, of the maimed - and offering it as verdict, when the world’s most careful investigators have not yet reached one.
J’accuse you of speaking two full minutes about the war in Gaza without once speaking the words October 7th - without once naming the massacre, the rape, the taking of hostages - babies and grandmothers - that began this war.
J’accuse you of silence - a silence so complete that anyone hearing you for the first time would never know Hamas exists at all.
J’accuse you of a modern blood libel: accusing Israel of murdering Gazans who Hamas itself murdered, using them as human shields.
J’accuse you, in that same breath, of accusing my grandchildren. When you call the Prime Minister of Israel a war criminal and an architect of genocide, you are not speaking only of one man in Jerusalem. You are speaking of the many thousands of children and grandchildren, brothers and sisters of New Yorkers who serve in the IDF army that defends the Jewish state.
J’accuse you of painting a target on the backs of Jews and of every New Yorker who supports Israel - because words like yours, spoken from the office you hold, do not stay contained. They travel. They are heard by those who already hate us, and they are heard as permission.
J’accuse you of finding words for Gaza but none for Iran’s hanged dissidents, none for the churches burned in Nigeria, none for the Uyghurs vanished into camps in China. A conscience that speaks only of Jews and their state, and falls silent before every other cruelty on earth, is not a universal conscience. It is something else - it is antisemitism.
J’accuse you of holding the highest office in the largest Jewish city outside of Israel, and using it to make antisemitism feel official - to make it feel less like hatred and more like policy.
And yet, Mr. Mayor - we have been here before.
We are a people with a long and bitter history of being accused. We have been called poisoners of wells, killers of gods, controllers of banks, and now, absurdly, perpetrators of the very crime that was done to us not one lifetime ago. We have heard every accusation there is. And we are still here.
Israel - a Jewish state standing alone in a sea of nations that would erase it - is not the crime you make it out to be. It is what a people builds when it refuses to disappear.
Every Passover, at the Seder table, we say these words: she’lo echad bilvad amad aleinu le’chaloteinu... - that in every generation, there rise those who seek to destroy us, but the Holy One delivers us from their hands. We say it every year. We will say it again this year.
And Mr. Mamdani - for the rest of my life, when I reach that line in the Haggadah, I will think of you.
J’accuse.