Betrayal

The strongest feeling I have right now is betrayal.

Not outrage or even shock. Just that dull, sinking sense that the people you thought shared your basic sense of decency don’t actually see you at all.

After watching Zohran Mamdani win, it’s hard to put that feeling into words. It’s not the extremists who bother me. Their hatred is loud, crude, and easy to recognize. What’s harder to accept is the quiet betrayal from the people around us. The people on the subway, in the office, at the grocery store. The people who smile politely, talk about tolerance, post about kindness, and still walked into a voting booth and chose someone who excuses violence against Jews.

That kind of betrayal cuts differently.

Because it tells you something uncomfortable about where you live. It tells you that antisemitism doesn’t always look like what we were taught to expect. It doesn’t always come with torches. Sometimes it wears a progressive label and speaks in the language of empathy. Sometimes it cloaks itself in “justice” and “freedom.” And sometimes it votes for a man who refuses to condemn a terrorist group that slaughtered Jewish families in their homes.

That’s the part people don’t understand. The betrayal isn’t some abstract thing. It’s personal. It’s looking around at your city, at the people you’ve worked alongside, volunteered with, trusted, and realizing that when it came down to something as basic as condemning terrorism, they couldn’t bring themselves to care.

And maybe that’s what hurts most. Not that they hate us, but that we simply don’t register.

Jews have always been the easiest group to overlook. We don’t fit neatly into their moral frameworks. We are both too safe and too threatened, too privileged and too persecuted, too familiar and too foreign. So people convince themselves that antisemitism is someone else’s problem, somewhere else. And when confronted with it in their own backyard, they look away. They rationalize it. They call it “complex.”

That’s what betrayal looks like in the modern age.

Over a million people voted for Mamdani. Over a million people heard him refuse to call on Hamas to disarm and decided it didn’t matter. Over a million people looked past his rhetoric, his alliances, and his record and said he represents us. They should be ashamed to look their Jewish neighbors, friends, and coworkers in the eye. Because they voted to normalize a worldview that treats Jewish safety as negotiable.

It would be easy to blame all of this on ideology alone, but there’s something deeper going on. America is struggling. People are drowning in rent, debt, and uncertainty. They are desperate for someone to tell them they’ve been wronged and that someone else is to blame. In that desperation, people stop thinking clearly. They mistake emotion for morality. They reach for simple answers, for villains to hate, for movements that promise fairness without effort.

That’s what Mamdani offers, not solutions but moral anesthesia. He tells people that their frustration is righteous, that their anger is justice, and that their failures are someone else’s fault. It’s intoxicating. It makes people feel noble without requiring them to take responsibility.

But when anger becomes identity, empathy dies. And when empathy dies, betrayal begins.

That’s what this election revealed. A political shift, but also a moral one. A city that once prided itself on toughness and decency now seems willing to excuse hate as long as it’s packaged in the right words. The betrayal is of the city’s own conscience.

Still, there’s something steady beneath the sadness. Jews have survived worse than indifference. We know what it means to stay standing when others falter. We know that loyalty and truth aren’t measured by popularity or polls.

So yes, this hurts. It should. But it also clarifies things. It reminds us who we are, and what kind of world we’re still trying to build.

The betrayal is theirs to bear. The strength to keep going is ours.