On May 15, Democratic House candidate Brad Lander stood before Friday prayers at the al Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Queens, and introduced himself as a proud Jewish New Yorker.
Then he told the room that Israel’s so-called “genocide” in Gaza was a desecration. That every Palestinian child there was as divine as his own beloved children. That in Congress, he would not vote for another dollar of American military aid, not for the bombs, not for the occupation in Lebanon, which he said was on its way, potentially, to being a genocide as well.
Then he said he hoped to build, with Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), the partnership he’d built with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Then he recited a verse of the Quran in Arabic.
Then he sat down, and the imam led the congregation in a prayer asking that relief come to the believers through the killing of infidels by the Mahdi’s sword.
The mosque’s longtime spiritual leader told the New York Sun 20 years ago that Jewish deaths in the Holocaust had been exaggerated.
Lander called it partnership. The video is public. His hosts posted it themselves.
Three and a half months later, on Saturday night, Lander stood in the street outside Madison Square Garden and said the same six words: “I’m a proud Jewish New Yorker.”
They told him to get out.
He had come to protest the RSS, the Hindu nationalist movement, whose chief was addressing five thousand people inside while thousands more filled the sidewalk. He had just compared the Garden hosting that event to the pro-Nazi rally that packed the same building in 1939. He announced himself: “I am Brad Lander, the Democratic candidate for Congress in New York’s 10th District, and I came here today to join others and say no to RSS.”
They called him a paid Zionist. They screamed obscenities I won’t reprint. They told him there was no place for him there.
They did not ask what kind of Zionist he was. They did not ask whether he’d called the war a genocide — he had, in one of their own houses of worship, four months earlier. They did not ask whether he refuses American Israel Public Affairs Committee money, because he does. They did not ask whether he’d pledged to cut off every remaining dollar of military aid to Israel, because he had, to warm applause, in Queens.
They heard “Zionist.” They heard “Jew.” To that crowd, there is no daylight between the two.
Some of them tried to shield him, and I won’t leave that out. Men stepped between Lander and the ones screaming. One said, “Brad, please, we are all here for the same cause.” Others said they were trying to protect him.
Sit with that. He needed protecting at a protest he showed up to join.
Now here is the part that ties the knot, and I should say plainly that I have a hand in it: I work with the European Jewish Association on this campaign.
The word Lander used in that mosque did not fall out of the sky. It was made by a man.
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish Jew who lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust. He invented the word “genocide” in 1944, built it out of Greek and Latin because no existing word was adequate to what had been done to his people, and then spent the rest of his life pushing the United Nations to adopt the convention that bears its name. He was a Zionist. He wrote for a Zionist journal. Scholars of his life credit that conviction as part of what drove the work.
In 2021, a nonprofit group incorporated in Pennsylvania took his name. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention never asked the family. Within weeks of Oct. 7, 2023, it was declaring that Israel was committing genocide, and it has been cited ever since by nearly every campaign making that claim, including by U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
Joseph Lemkin, Raphael’s first cousin once removed, an attorney in New Jersey, and the closest living relative, asked them to stop using the family name. They refused.
So he went to the state. The complaint he filed with the European Jewish Association, addressed to Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) and Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations, puts it about as clearly as it can be put: the Institute “represents itself as an embodiment of Mr. Lemkin’s ideology,” while its “policies, positions, activities and publications are anathema to Mr. Lemkin’s belief system.” In June, the family and the EJA delivered a hundred verified letters to Shapiro, Attorney General Dave Sunday, the Justice Department, the IRS, the Treasury, and Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation. Pennsylvania has opened an investigation.
The institute calls the complaint defamatory. It says it shares Lemkin’s belief in a Jewish national home, and that this hasn’t stopped it from seeing what it calls the genocide in front of it. Readers can weigh that answer for themselves. I’ve weighed it.
Here’s what I want you to see.
A Zionist Jew invented a word to name what was done to the Jews. An organization took his name without permission, and turned his word against the Jewish state. And then, a Jewish congressional candidate stood in a Queens mosque and used that word, Lemkin’s word, made from Lemkin’s dead, to indict Israel, in a room where the prayer that followed him asked for infidels to be put to the sword.
Three months later, a crowd on Eighth Avenue took a word off Lander and used it to throw him into the street.
He should have recognized the technique. He’d already seen it work. He’d already helped it work.
I’ve written about Lander before, and I was not kind. I once wrote that they would put me in the same oven as him.
That was extreme. I meant it to be. I wanted it to be a sentence you read twice.
And I want to be clear about Saturday: I took no pleasure in it. A man walked into a crowd expecting friends and learned, on camera, that he had none. That is a specific humiliation, and under it is fear, because a crowd that has decided you don’t belong has already done the difficult part. I wouldn’t have wanted to be standing where he stood, and neither would you.
But I’d be lying if I called it surprising.
Last fall, at a Jews for Racial and Economic Justice gala, Lander called for a coalition of anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists, and told a thousand people he hadn’t done enough to speak out against Israel’s war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and the forced starvation of Palestinians. They cheered. In July, he sat with Dana Bash on CNN and explained carefully what he means by Zionist: that he wants Israel to honor international law and Palestinian rights so it can be the Jewish and democratic country he grew up believing in. Running for mayor last year, he was arrested by federal agents at an immigration hearing. Whatever you make of that, he didn’t send a press release. He showed up.
None of it bought him 10 feet of sidewalk.
Because they were never negotiating over policy. That’s the thing Brad still hasn’t understood, and it’s the thing I need everyone reading this to understand.
They do not distinguish between a Jew in a Jewish neighborhood in South Florida who tells you exactly where he stands, and a Jew in Brooklyn who has spent two years proving how far he’ll go to criticize the Jewish state. To that crowd, he and I are the same man. We were always the same man. The only difference is that one of us was told, and one of us found out.
So, Brad. I’m glad it was words and not hands. Watch your back, and there’s no edge in that at all. I wouldn’t want to be a Jewish politician in New York City right now, no matter the party, no matter the district.
THEY STOLE A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR’S NAME. WHEN HIS FAMILY OBJECTED, THEY FOUND ANOTHER LEMKIN
You said you’re a proud Jewish New Yorker. Good. Say it again. Say it louder.
But understand what happened to you. Understand how they see you. How they see us, Brad.
Warren H. Cohn is founder and CEO of RocketshipPR.