New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani responded to a protest at Park East Synagogue (a historic Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side) for hosting an event with Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit organization that helps North American Jews make aliyah (immigrate to Israel), in which protesters used phrases like “globalize the infitada” and “death to the IDF.” His response falsely implied that Jewish immigration to Israel is “in violation of international law,” and refused to condemn the use of antisemitic language by the protesters.

Amos Oz, an Israeli writer and peace activist, said it best: “When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, ‘Jews go home to Palestine [...] Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, ‘Jews get out of Palestine.” If one believes that Jews moving to Israel is illegal, while we are relentlessly attacked throughout the diaspora, as they did to my family in Ethiopia throughout the 20th century, where do you expect us to go? In other words, the issue is not where Jews live, but that we live at all.