When I first heard Zohran Mamdani rail against Israel and Zionism, I did not think of the war in Gaza. I thought of Poland in 1968. The political language I grew up hearing about from my parents and grandparents — the language that helped drive them from their country of birth — was suddenly echoing through New York, decades later and an ocean away.
My family was among the thousands of Jews forced out of Communist Poland little more than two decades after the Holocaust. They were harassed, humiliated, stripped of their place in society, and ultimately driven from the country for no reason other than being Jewish. The regime never called its campaign antisemitic. It called it anti-Zionist. That distinction made much of what followed possible.
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