Threads · field report
I'm a Jew in California who believes Israel has a right to exist — and who's no fan of Netanyahu. When the mayor of New York called AIPAC "monsters," I said the obvious: calling Jews and their institutions "monsters" is antisemitic. What came back left me less angry than heartbroken. So I counted it.
I'm just a Jew from California, not a pundit. But when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood on a Brooklyn stage and called AIPAC "monsters," I said something simple on Threads:
The post got 762 likes — and roughly 1,500 comments, the overwhelming majority hostile. In internet terms, I got "ratio'd." But I didn't just want to feel outnumbered. I wanted to know exactly who was in that pile, and what they were saying. So I counted.
Of the 311 replies, 46 directly addressed me with a charge or insult. Sorted by type:
The single most-liked reply in the entire thread — 413 likes, far more than my post earned per reader — simply said: "You're a monster, too."
The people piling on were mostly small, often anonymous accounts. Of the 26 I checked:
Half had under 100 followers. Several — including the accounts posting the most openly antisemitic content — had zero posts of their own: throwaway, single-purpose accounts. The one big exception was that 413-like "monster" reply, from a verified account with 125,000 followers. By contrast, the people who backed me were the larger, established accounts (238 to 2,383 followers, two verified).
Most people arguing with me made a political point: AIPAC is a lobby, not Judaism; criticizing it isn't antisemitism. That's a fair debate, and plenty of Jews are on that side of it. But a clear seam of replies wasn't debating policy at all. It was attacking Jews. A sample, verbatim (profanity masked):
At least 6 clearly antisemitic replies in a 20% sample. Extrapolated across the full thread, that's plausibly 25–30. These don't belong in a political disagreement — they belong in a report to the platform.
Here's the case, made carefully — because the careful version is the one that holds up.
A lot of the anger rests on a false premise: that AIPAC, and pro-Israel Jews, are a right-wing or pro-Trump bloc. The record says otherwise.
It spent $50M+ on candidates in both parties — with the larger share going to Democrats. Its stated mission is strengthening the U.S.–Israel alliance, a bipartisan foreign-policy aim.
Most Jewish voters backed Harris in 2024 (66–79%), and Jews have voted roughly 70%+ Democratic for decades. Equating AIPAC — or pro-Israel Jews — with Trump and the far right doesn't match the funding record or how Jews actually vote.
This wasn't a slip he walked back. Over a few days, Mamdani escalated:
The ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Combat Antisemitism Movement called the remarks "reckless" and said they "put a bullseye on the Jewish community." Pinning regional bloodshed on a Jewish lobby revives one of the oldest antisemitic tropes — that Jews engineer wars. That is dangerous and unacceptable from any leader, let alone the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.
Let me be clear, because people online love to collapse this on purpose. I believe Israel has a right to exist. That makes me, technically, a Zionist — a word that's been turned into a slur, but all it means is that the Jewish people, like every people, have a right to a homeland, and that Israel shouldn't be wiped off the map.
That is not the same as defending its government. I'm no fan of Netanyahu, and frankly I'll be relieved when he's gone. "Israel should exist" and "Netanyahu is doing a great job" are two completely different sentences — no matter how hard the replies tried to staple them together.
There's a line, usually attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre, that captures exactly what this week felt like:
(The precise wording is debated, but the idea runs straight through his Anti-Semite and Jew.)
Mostly, though, I'm just sad. Sad that in 2026, in my own feed, I watched "AIPAC is a lobby" slide into the oldest libels about my people. Sad that a mayor's words gave it cover. Sad that any of this still needs saying.
And it's not only anonymous strangers. It's the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in America calling AIPAC "monsters." It's his wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, who — as Jewish Insider, the Times of Israel and NBC New York reported — liked Instagram posts praising the October 7 attack as "resistance." She apologized for separate teenage posts that used slurs; she has not addressed those likes. When that's the mainstream, the hate in my replies stops looking like a fringe.
That's what 1,500 replies wanted: to watch me empty my pockets. To make me prove, reply by reply, that I'm not a monster, not a "genocide supporter," not the caricature they'd already decided I was. Here's my answer: I'm not emptying my pockets for the prosecutor. There's no verdict waiting there. I'm talking to the audience — to you.