Ezra Klein in the New York Times:
Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor has forced, among many Jews, a reckoning with how far they have drifted from one another. Mamdani does not use the slogan “globalize the intifada,” but he does not condemn those who do. He has said that if he were mayor, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, would face arrest on war crimes charges if he set foot in New York City. Israel has a right to exist, he says, but “as a state with equal rights.”
Many older Jews I know are shocked and scared by Mamdani’s victory. Israel, to them, is the world’s only reliable refuge for the Jewish people. They see opposition to Israel as a cloak for antisemitism. They believe that if the United States abandons Israel then Israel will, sooner or later, cease to exist. To them, Mamdani is a harbinger. If he can win in New York City — a city with more Jews than any save Tel Aviv — then nowhere is safe.
Many younger Jews I know voted for Mamdani. They are not afraid of him. What they fear is a future in which Israel is an apartheid state ruling over ruins in Gaza and Bantustans in the West Bank.
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Rail: We have spoken in the past of the status that a copy has in Japan, that, for instance, it is not unusual or out of place to see a copy of a national treasure standing in for an original work in a museum. Practically, most treasures are too fragile and too old to be on continuous view, but it is also more than that, more like the copy can transmit what the original is meant to transmit. This bothers us in the West, but less so in Japan. We have also spoken of a copy as a way of both affirming and breaking from a teacher. Your idea of a person vicariously reaching back to Matabei through your work seems in this vein.
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