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New Hate, Old Story

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New words, old accusations: Mamdani and the politics of Jewish power

Criticizing AIPAC is legitimate. Mamdani's references to monsters, dark money, preserving power, and social division prompted debate over campaign-finance transparency and antisemitic tropes.

About 11 min read

AIPAC is a political organization. It can be investigated, opposed, defeated, and criticized. None of that is antisemitic by itself.

At a June 18 rally, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani listed AIPAC among several political forces he called "monsters." He accused it of moving "millions in dark money" to "preserve their power" and "turn us against one another." Some Jewish leaders and Mamdani allies argued that this combination echoed antisemitic conspiracy narratives. Mamdani said he was criticizing AIPAC and super PAC practices.

TL;DR

The weak argument says that criticizing AIPAC is antisemitic because AIPAC advocates for Israel and many of its supporters are Jewish. That standard would make ordinary political accountability impossible. Lobbying groups and super PACs exercise power. Journalists and politicians should follow the money and challenge their claims.

The stronger argument is about how Mamdani chose to do it. He did not merely say that a registered super PAC spent a stated sum in a stated race. He combined claims about opaque funding with the language of monsters, preserved power, and a force turning the public against itself. When Jewish allies as well as longtime critics warned that the combination echoed antisemitic conspiracy stories, he defended the wording.

What Mamdani actually said

At a June 18, 2026 rally for progressive candidates in Brooklyn, Mamdani invoked a popular paraphrase commonly, but inaccurately, presented as a direct quotation from Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci: "Now is the time of monsters." According to CNN's report and quotation of the speech, he described the "monsters" as including groups funding television advertisements against candidates he supported. He then singled out AIPAC.

"They move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another, instead of our leaders turning towards the moral change we all know to be necessary."

(Zohran Mamdani, Brooklyn rally, June 18, 2026, as quoted by CNN)

Mamdani also said AIPAC feared "democracy being allowed to run its course" and "an end to genocide and Netanyahu's wars." When reporters asked whether "monsters" and "dark money" invoked antisemitic tropes, he did not apologize. He said the term applied broadly to super PACs and others preventing the birth of a new political world, not solely to AIPAC.

That context matters. Mamdani was not giving a speech about Jews as a people. He was campaigning against outside spending in Democratic primaries. His slate included Jewish former New York City comptroller Brad Lander. Any serious analysis has to include those facts rather than editing the scene into a simpler accusation.

Context does not erase the words, either. AIPAC was the named organization, and Mamdani combined monsters, allegedly opaque money, preserved power, social division, and mass death abroad. Critics argued that the combination carried more historical weight than a conventional objection to super PAC spending.

The campaign-finance critique is fair game

AIPAC and its affiliated super PAC, United Democracy Project, spend heavily in federal elections. The Federal Election Commission lists United Democracy Project as an independent-expenditure-only committee. CNN reported that United Democracy Project transferred $650,000 to another super PAC supporting one of the incumbents opposed by Mamdani. That transfer became public before New York's June 23 primary.

Mamdani also referred more broadly to money routed through organizations whose funders become clear only after an election. That description fits documented AIPAC-linked spending in the 2026 Illinois primaries. The Brennan Center for Justice reported that AIPAC funneled more than $5 million to two groups whose federal fundraising reports were not due until after voters cast their ballots.

"Dark money" generally means political spending whose ultimate source is not disclosed. United Democracy Project reports its immediate donors, but a super PAC can still receive money from donor-concealing nonprofits or route funds through pass-through committees that delay useful disclosure. The record therefore includes both disclosed super PAC funding and documented efforts that left voters without timely information. Mamdani's underlying transparency concern was not invented, even if critics objected to the way he framed it.

A concrete campaign-finance case

Name the committee, amount, transfer, advertisement, filing, donor rule, and election affected.

The evidence can be checked and the same rule can be applied to every PAC.

A conspiratorial political story

Turn documented opacity into a total story about a monstrous pro-Israel force preserving its power and turning citizens against one another.

That language does more than explain a filing.

Rabbi Misha Shulman, a Mamdani supporter, made this distinction in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He called AIPAC's influence a legitimate subject of criticism but said the "dark money" framing invited traditional antisemitism into the conversation. Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T'ruah, another progressive critic of AIPAC, wrote that calling AIPAC and its backers "monsters" cast political opponents as less than human.

Both defended criticism of AIPAC, but their objections differed. Jacobs criticized the dehumanizing "monsters" label, while Shulman warned that the "dark money" framing could invite traditional antisemitic interpretations.

The old story: secret money and hidden Jewish control

Antisemitism changes its nouns more easily than its plot. One of its most durable plots says that a small, concealed Jewish network controls finance, media, government, or war while ordinary people mistake the result for democratic choice. The site's explainer on hidden control traces the pattern in more detail.

The most notorious version is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the text as a fabrication that presented supposed meeting minutes of Jewish leaders plotting to control politics, financial markets, media, education, and other institutions. It was exposed as fraudulent, but exposure did not stop its circulation.

Henry Ford gave the conspiracy an American megaphone

Beginning in 1920, Henry Ford's newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published a series later collected as The International Jew. The Holocaust Encyclopedia explains that Ford used his prestige to spread lies about Jewish power over politics, economics, and media. The story told readers that an apparently open society was really being manipulated by a coordinated minority.

Father Coughlin updated it for radio

In the 1930s, Father Charles Coughlin reached tens of millions of listeners. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's biography documents how he attacked "international bankers," widely understood by his audience to mean Jewish bankers, and published claims about Jewish financiers controlling world politics. He eventually promoted his own version of the Protocols.

The historical pattern is not simply "someone talked about money." Campaign finance is real, and wealthy interests really do influence politics. The pattern emerges when money is joined to a totalizing story: concealed actors preserve their power, corrupt democracy, divide the public, and produce suffering for their own ends.

Why Mamdani's wording carries the echo

Mamdani did not merely call AIPAC wrong. He portrayed it as an enemy of democracy that uses opaque funding to preserve power and turn Americans against one another. The evidence supports serious criticism of AIPAC-linked spending and delayed disclosure. It does not require the language of monsters.

The IHRA working definition published by the U.S. State Department is non-legally binding. It states that criticism of Israel comparable to criticism directed at any other country is not antisemitic. It also identifies stereotypical allegations about Jews collectively controlling government or the economy as a possible example of antisemitism, depending on context. Whether Mamdani's remarks about AIPAC fit that example is a contested interpretation, not a conclusion supplied by the definition itself.

AIPAC is not synonymous with Jews. It has both Jewish and non-Jewish supporters, while Jewish Americans disagree sharply about the organization. That distinction is essential to legitimate criticism. Yet it does not make historical memory irrelevant. AIPAC is publicly identified with pro-Israel advocacy, and political attacks on it can bleed into assumptions about Jewish neighbors.

This is the same boundary discussed in the site's explainer on when "Zionist" becomes a slur. A political label can describe a real position. It can also become a replacement noun carrying an older accusation.

A historical echo is not a historical equivalence

Mamdani is not Henry Ford or Father Coughlin. He did not publish the Protocols, accuse Jews as a people of controlling the world, defend antisemitic violence, or organize a movement against Jewish citizens. Saying otherwise would replace analysis with exaggeration.

The comparison is narrower and more useful. Ford and Coughlin show why language about secret money and hidden control can alarm Jewish listeners. Mamdani applied several related terms to AIPAC, not to Jews collectively. Some listeners nevertheless heard an antisemitic echo because AIPAC is prominently associated with pro-Israel advocacy. Others may regard that comparison as unwarranted given the documented campaign-finance practices at issue.

Nor does invoking a later paraphrase of Gramsci settle the issue. A borrowed phrase still has a speaker, target, and audience. Applying "monsters" to several organizations and political forces broadens the label beyond AIPAC, but critics can still reasonably object to its dehumanizing character.

A better test for criticizing political power

Political money deserves aggressive scrutiny. The way to keep that scrutiny from becoming group libel is to make it more concrete, not less forceful.

  • Name the legal entity: AIPAC, United Democracy Project, an intermediary PAC, or an individual donor.
  • Cite the amount, filing, transfer date, disclosure deadline, advertisement, and race.
  • Use the same language and standard for comparable super PACs across causes and parties.
  • Criticize policies and tactics without describing organizations, political forces, or their backers as monsters or as one malicious bloc.
  • Do not slide from a pro-Israel organization to "Zionists" generally, and from there to Jewish people.
  • When allies identify a historical trope, answer the substance instead of treating every warning as an effort to silence debate.

Mamdani's criticism of AIPAC is not inherently antisemitic. His combination of "monsters," "dark money," preserving power, and social division led some Jewish critics, including a supporter, to hear an older antisemitic echo. That concern should be considered alongside the documented opacity in contemporary super PAC financing.

Selected sources

Contemporary reporting and campaign-finance records first, followed by historical reference sources and related on-site explainers.