By: Fern Sidman – Jewish Voice News

The resurfacing of a 2002 university lecture by Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani—father of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani—has ignited a new political firestorm in a city already shaken by unprecedented levels of antisemitic hostility. The footage, unearthed and first highlighted by Canary Mission, reveals the elder Mamdani comparing Israel to apartheid-era South Africa, invoking Adolf Hitler to explain European attitudes toward the Holocaust, and characterizing Jewish survivors as “today’s perpetrators.”

On Sunday, The New York Post, which has closely followed Zohran Mamdani’s rise and the controversies surrounding his far-left, anti-Israel positions, reported the comments as a deeply disturbing insight into the ideological milieu that shaped the soon-to-be mayor. The timing could not be more consequential: Jewish New Yorkers are reeling from threats, harassment, and physical intimidation—from college campuses to city streets—and the mayor-elect’s own rhetoric has already drawn widespread condemnation.

Mahmood Mamdani delivered the speech on November 16, 2002 at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, a politically charged moment that came just one year after the September 11 attacks reshaped America’s understanding of extremism. According to the information provided in The New York Post report, Mamdani framed Israel as a colonial, apartheid-like power and suggested that Holocaust survivors—those who endured mass murder, displacement, and industrialized dehumanization—had become “perpetrators” against Palestinians.

“That same specter must also haunt the survivors of the Holocaust in Israel—yesterday’s victims turned today’s perpetrators,” he said.

Jewish leaders and scholars immediately described the remark as a textbook example of historical inversion—turning the victims of genocide into alleged architects of oppression. The rhetorical tactic is widely recognized by antisemitism watchdogs as one of the most insidious forms of contemporary Jew-hatred.

The New York Post report emphasized that such language is not merely “philosophical.” In a climate where “globalize the intifada” has become a rallying cry at protests, where Jewish students are barricaded in libraries, and where synagogues have endured mob intimidation, this narrative actively fuels danger.

Mamdani went still further, invoking Adolf Hitler as a kind of colonial mirror. “The European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had been previously applied to the Arabs in Algeria, the Koulis in India and the Negroes in Africa,” he said. “The Holocaust was the imperial chickens come home.”

For many listeners, his words minimized the genocidal purpose of Nazism and reduced the Holocaust to a geopolitical backlash—an argument widely rejected by historians. The New York Post report noted that this framing mirrors the rhetoric now frequently deployed by anti-Israel activists, who have increasingly used Holocaust comparisons to delegitimize Jewish statehood.

Critics argue that the intellectual worldview expressed by Mahmood Mamdani aligns closely with the public positions of his son, the incoming mayor. Zohran Mamdani has publicly endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, labeled Israel an apartheid state, and pledged to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should the Israeli leader visit New York City.

The New York Post has reported on the mayor-elect’s refusal to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” his statements describing Israel as a “settler-colonial project,” and his insistence that an aliyah-promotion event at Park East Synagogue constituted a “violation of international law.” Analysts see an unmistakable through-line: the same intellectual architecture found in the 2002 lecture—Israel defined as “colonizer,” Jews framed as “perpetrators,” violence rationalized as “resistance”—is the foundation of the mayor-elect’s politics.

Canary Mission, the watchdog organization that uncovered the recording, stated bluntly: “Mahmood Mamdani is one of the most antisemitic voices in academia by spewing lies and distortions uninterrupted.” The New York Post reported the group’s further assertion that the elder Mamdani has spent decades influencing “impressionable students” at Columbia University and beyond.

The resurfaced lecture comes at a moment when New York City is facing the gravest antisemitic surge in generations. The New York Post has documented case after case: Jewish students harassed at CUNY; mobs chanting “Death to the IDF” outside Park East Synagogue; Orthodox Jews threatened on subways; pro-Hamas rallies shutting down streets; Jewish professors forced to flee their classrooms.

After the October 7 massacre, antisemitic harassment and violence skyrocketed across the five boroughs. Jewish New Yorkers across political and denominational lines fear that a mayor openly aligned with anti-Israel organizations—and mentored by a father who cast Holocaust survivors as colonial aggressors—will only normalize the hostility.

The mayor-elect’s perceived alignment with a narrative that casts Jews as “oppressors” and Palestinian violence as “resistance” raises the stakes further. Jewish civic leaders told The New York Post that they see a political dynamic in which their safety is increasingly framed as negotiable.

Mahmood Mamdani’s academic specialty—colonialism, decolonization, and anti-colonial resistance—makes his critiques of Israel unsurprising. But critics argue that academic freedom does not excuse antisemitism masquerading as scholarship. Comparing Holocaust survivors to apartheid enforcers, or reframing Hitler’s genocidal project as an inevitable repercussion of colonialism, crosses the threshold from intellectual critique to historical distortion.

Moreover, as The New York Post report stressed, the issue transcends academia. It concerns what ideas inform political action—particularly when that action will soon be directed from City Hall.

Mamdani’s 2002 remarks, viewed today, read like a blueprint for the anti-Israel activism now ascendent across the city. The “victim/perpetrator inversion,” the depiction of Israel as a colonial aggressor, the portrayal of Palestinian terrorism as anti-colonial resistance—these are precisely the narratives that have galvanized student movements, fueled intimidation campaigns, and shaped the discourse that the mayor-elect himself has embraced.

Zohran Mamdani has yet to respond to the resurfaced video, but The New York Post reported that inquiries to both father and son went unanswered. Silence, in the eyes of many Jewish New Yorkers, is not neutral—it is alarming.

The mayor-elect’s critics insist that at minimum he must disavow the notion that Holocaust survivors are “today’s perpetrators.” They argue that failing to condemn such a statement would constitute tacit acceptance of a worldview that has already endangered Jewish New Yorkers.

Political observers say the controversy could intensify questions surrounding the mayor-elect’s capacity to govern a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. The New York Post has chronicled deep anxiety within the Jewish community, including a recent Siena poll showing that 72 percent of Jewish New Yorkers believe Mamdani’s mayoralty will be “bad for the city.”

If Mamdani intends to reassure a rattled constituency, he will have to confront not only his own rhetoric but the intellectual legacy that appears to have shaped him.

For many New Yorkers, Mahmood Mamdani’s lecture is more than a historical footnote—it is a warning sign. At a time when antisemitism is rising at a terrifying pace, when synagogues are besieged by extremist mobs, and when terrorists are openly celebrated on college campuses, the city’s leadership cannot afford equivocation, let alone sympathy for ideologies that justify hatred.

As The New York Post has noted repeatedly, New York stands at a tipping point. The question now is whether its incoming mayor will confront that reality—or reinforce it.