ByZVIKA KLEIN

MAY 31, 2026 03:47

Updated: MAY 31, 2026 11:24

In the winter of 1789, French noble Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre addressed the National Assembly to support citizenship for Jews. His position prevailed. Yet it included a stipulation that has influenced Jewish existence ever since. He declared that Jews as individuals deserved full rights, while Jews as a nation received none.

This amounted to acceptance in return for assimilation.

One could identify as a Frenchman following Mosaic traditions. One could not claim membership in a distinct people. Quiet private worship earned republican approval. Public assertion of nationhood and shared destiny voided the arrangement.

Zohran Mamdani has extended a comparable proposition to New York Jews. He likely remains unaware of the parallel.

Consider the mayor's actions. For 61 years, every New York mayor participated in the Israel Day Parade. Mamdani will abstain. His police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, will serve as grand marshal, with the city ensuring comprehensive security measures.

The arrangement reveals its core. The mayor will deploy officers to safeguard individual Jewish residents. He stops short of honoring the Jewish collective. Protection extends to the Jew as a private citizen, while solidarity with the Jew as part of a people is withheld.

This mirrors Clermont-Tonnerre's formulation almost exactly, more than two centuries later. Full rights for the Jew as an individual. None for the Jew as a people.

'To the Jews as individuals, everything; to the Jews as a nation, nothing'

The politician advancing this condition presents himself as America's most progressive mayor. That claim warrants close examination.

The longstanding requirement that Jews reduce themselves from a people to a private faith in exchange for inclusion has been presented anew to the world's largest Jewish community outside Israel, by a leader convinced of his alignment with the marginalized.

He has recast the 1789 arrangement and viewed it as progress.

Supporters will frame the stance as focused on Israel, Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or specific policies rather than the people themselves. Yet the parade represents neither a Netanyahu event nor an official government display nor a Knesset gathering along Fifth Avenue.

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of the New York Board of Rabbis summarized it concisely: it is not a policy parade but a Jewish people parade. Mamdani has declined to align with an Israeli cabinet. He has declined to stand with a people appearing publicly as such.

Similar steps preceded this moment. On his first day, he withdrew prior directives preventing city agencies from boycotting Israel or adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Israel's Foreign Ministry described the move as inflammatory. He has declined to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. He omitted Israel's Independence Day observance. Each decision conveys the same message as the parade decision. The private Jew receives safety. The collective Jew does not.

Defenders offer a ready response. They maintain that anti-Zionism targets only one political view, comparable to a mayor skipping a rally for an opposing party.

Zionism, however, represents the Jewish people's assertion of existence as a people within history, beyond synagogue walls alone. For most Jews worldwide, it forms part of identity rather than a detachable opinion.

Requiring a Jew to set it aside for civic acceptance does not request a change of view. It requests that the tolerable portion of Jewishness remain visible while the rest stays hidden, which restates the 1789 condition in contemporary terms.

The arrangement always carried risk. Clermont-Tonnerre's France granted emancipation and then spent generations finding Jews difficult to tolerate regardless.

The assurance that acceptance would follow the end of peoplehood faced its ultimate test. Jews integrated, converted, served, and sacrificed for the societies requiring their disappearance, yet this offered no protection when conditions darkened. The Jew who consented to national disappearance faced destruction as one anyway.

Vienna adopted the updated form most rapidly.

Karl Lueger, mayor from 1897 to 1910, demonstrated that a refined European city could operate an effective, popular, openly anti-Jewish administration without concentration camps.

A young Adolf Hitler observed his ability to mobilize crowds and later praised him as the finest German mayor of the era. Separating the Jewish collective requires no dictator at the outset. It requires a respected elected official who concludes that Jewish peoplehood is the element a proper city can discard.

This explains why New York Jews should reject the arrangement rather than negotiate its details. When a mayor indicates that Zionism poses the difficulty, the impulse arises to demonstrate acceptability. Reduce visible symbols. Note personal criticisms of certain Israeli policies.

That impulse enacts the arrangement precisely as intended. It concedes that Jewish peoplehood constitutes a manageable burden rather than an inherent reality. Every Jew who accepted the terms discovered that the boundary of permissible Jewishness shifts steadily toward reduction.

The response to Mamdani therefore centers not on intensified debate over Israel. It centers on a parade that resists reduction.

Participate, display the flags, include the children, the Holocaust survivors and October 7 survivors, the secular Israelis and the Persian, Bukharian, and Russian-speaking Jews, the Reform and Orthodox and those unaffiliated with any synagogue, along with every ally who recognizes that a free city does not require its Jews to diminish themselves for inclusion.

Mamdani presented New York Jews with a 234-year-old proposition framed as fresh ethics. Full rights as individuals. None as a people. New York Jews have encountered this proposition previously, in French and in German, and they understand its consequences for those who accept. The parade already supplies the fitting reply.

We accept the full rights. We retain the refusal of peoplehood. And we proceed along Fifth Avenue as the element the arrangement prohibits: a people, openly present, without fear.