If you follow Jewish media – ANY type of Jewish media – you’ve probably heard the words “habibi city” repeated a LOT in the past couple of weeks.
If you haven’t, well – A. I’m jealous of your life. And B. Welcome to the firestorm. I’ll do my best to summarize.
On August 10, 2026, New York Magazine released an issue dedicated entirely to the flowering of SWANA culture across New York City. What is SWANA? Well, the acronym means Southwest Asian and North African. But the cover story’s writer, Zaina Arafat – no relation to the other Arafat, ya know, the late PLO Chairman – provides a more expansive definition. Quote:
“To be in SWANA community meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns. That to care is nonnegotiable. Unlike ‘Muslim,’ it was not defined by religion. And unlike ‘Middle East,’ a term coined by an American and popularized by the British to define our countries and identities in relation to them, SWANA suggested a decolonial framework and a way of moving through the world.” End quote.
Ok.
Now, to be fair, Zaina Arafat does not explicitly come out and say that to be in SWANA community means disavowing Israel’s existence. But the implication is repeated throughout the issue. Particularly when she claims this next part, that, quote:
“While Israel is geographically part of the region, the question of whether Israelis can claim a connection to it, particularly given the political framework of terms like SWANA, is complicated — and it gets more so depending on a person’s ethnic background.” End quote.
Non-Jews and anti-Zionists, however, are welcome in the club. Arafat writes, quote:
“Zohran Mamdani is not technically from the SWANA region, but he is deeply embedded in its culture and reflected it back throughout his campaign, dining in SWANA-owned establishments, meeting with SWANA leaders, supporting the work of his wife, Rama Duwaji, and generally making it look fun to be SWANA adjacent…”
Mamdani is ethnically Indian, born in Uganda, and raised mostly in New York. He’s allowed in the SWANA club. But Israelis, who are literally from Southwest Asia, are not.
Arafat caps off the cover story with an observation that, frankly, astounded me. Ready for this one? Quote:
“none of this means SWANA New Yorkers don’t still face xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism — along with the repercussions of speaking out against them.” End quote.
There were some other interesting passages throughout the issue – particularly a reference to, quote, “the land mass currently called Israel” – and as you can imagine, many Jews around the world, but particularly in New York, were pretty, pretty, pretty ticked off.
Including me.
Reading this issue was frustrating and painful and difficult.
But that’s not why I’m recording this episode. I’m not interested in airing yet another takedown of New York magazine. That’s been done, and if you’re looking for a comprehensive explanation of why this issue was deeply offensive, you can find some good links in the show notes.
I want to talk about something else.
I want to talk about historical patterns.
About the fact that none of this is new.
Habibi City is just the latest iteration of a very familiar historical phenomenon.
Only the language differs. The presentation. The costuming. But remove all of that, and what’s left is deeply familiar.
I could draw any number of historical parallels, but the one that I can’t get out of my mind is the student protests that rocked Poland for a few months in 1968.
What, that wasn’t your first guess? Weird.
But the writers and editors behind Habibi City, behind the antizionist graffiti all over New York City, behind the casual, thoughtless Substack and X and TikTok posts decrying Zionism as a unique historical evil – they’re all reading from an ancient playbook, whether they know it or not.
It’s the same playbook that the Polish government used to quash dissent. A formula that has worked for thousands of years.
And if you don’t know your history, if you can’t spot the patterns, it might lure you in, too. It might seem reasonable. It might seem right.
It isn’t.
But I’m being cryptic, so let me explain. Let’s talk about Poland in 1968.
Quick refresh on modern Polish history:
Before World War II, Poland was an independent republic. Then Germany and the Soviet Union showed up with tanks. Germany invaded from the west, the Soviets came in from the east, and together, they carved up Poland between them.
But the Nazi-Soviet alliance was relatively short-lived, and by the summer of 1941, the Soviets were fighting against the Nazis. The Red Army eventually managed to push the Nazis out, but in the aftermath of World War II, Stalin had no intention of leaving Poland, which was strategically valuable. Sure, he promised the US and the UK that Poland would get free elections and everything would be FINE. But that’s not what happened.
Instead, the country became a Soviet satellite state, helped by the Polish communists on the ground who were willing to do the dirty work for the USSR: intimidating opponents, manipulating elections, silencing critics… the whole authoritarian playbook. Yes, Poland was still technically an independent country, but everyone knew that its communist government answered to Mother Russia.
With me so far?
Great.
Fast-forward to 1968 – a tumultuous year for basically the entire world.
In the US, it was all bell-bottoms and free love, anti-Vietnam war protests and civil unrest and political assassinations: MLK in April of 1968 and RFK two months later. In Israel, we’re talking post-Six Day War euphoria, mixed with low-level skirmishes with Egypt and the PLO.
And in Poland, student protests were gathering steam.
In November of 1967, the Polish National Theatre revived a classic 19th century play whose Polish name I won’t attempt to mangle, about Tsarist Russia’s oppression of Poland.
Now, you’d think that the Communist government would be aaaaall about that, given their own negative feelings towards the Tsar, right?
Wrong.
The play might have been written about Tsarist Russia, but the parallels with Soviet Russia were PAINFULLY obvious. And even if the director hadn’t intended to criticize the USSR, and by extension Poland’s Communist government, he couldn’t stop the audience from reading whatever they wanted into his staging. That’s art, you know? You can’t stop your audience from interpreting your work.
So the Polish government let the theater know that the play would be ending its run early.
Ever heard of the Streisand Effect? In 2003, Barbara Streisand made the enormous mistake of trying to suppress a photograph of her house that had somehow made it onto the Internet or the tabloids. But the harder she tried to suppress the photo, the more attention she drew to it.
Well, the Polish government more or less did the same thing. They decided the play was so dangerous that it needed to be suppressed. But this repression just handed young revolutionaries more ammo for a revolt.
So after the play’s final performance on January 30th, 1968, students from Warsaw University took to the streets. They weren’t rowdy or violent, but the police still detained and fined a bunch of them.
In response, protestors circulated petitions across the country, getting thousands of signatures. And instead of, I don’t know, ignoring it, or actually easing up on the censorship, the government went all-in, expelling two student organizers from Warsaw University.
Well. If the protestors were ticked off before, now they were LIVID.
But when they took to the streets, they met policemen with batons, as well as volunteer militias made up of “concerned citizens” ready to throw fists in a rapidly escalating cycle of violence. The harder the government cracked down, the angrier the protests became, each party egging the other on until no one could even imagine a stopping point.
So the Communist government turned to the oldest trick in the book: blame the Jews.
Now, at this point, you might be thinking uh, what Jews? This is Poland post-Holocaust. Weren’t 90% of the country’s Jews murdered like two decades before?
Yes. Yes they were. 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland in 1939. Six years later, 90% of them were dead. Most of the 300,000 survivors chose NOT to stay in Poland, for obvious reasons, but a handful remained. By 1968, roughly 25,000 – 30,000 Jews lived in Poland, making up less than .1% of the country’s total population.
A tiny, tiny minority – the smallest remnant of a once-thriving community of millions.
But there were juuuuuuust enough Jews involved in the protests to give the government an excellent, if very cliched and tired, idea: Scapegoating.
Now, the Polish leader at the time, Władysław Gomułka, didn’t get there on his own. As we’ve discussed many times before – links in the show notes – Israel’s victory in the Six Day War had REALLY ticked off the Soviet Union. The USSR had gambled on the Arab states, and in under a week, Israel had turned over $1 billion worth of Soviet weaponry into scrap metal, humiliating three Arab armies and the empire that backed them. Immediately, the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with Israel and stepped up its anti-Zionist propaganda campaign, exporting violent and hateful misinformation all around the world.
So did Poland.
In fact, shortly after the Six Day War, Gomułka himself had referred to Polish Jews as a “fifth column” – an internal enemy, working to take down the government from the inside. Now, in the wake of the student protests, Gomułka expanded the accusation, dividing Polish Jews into three groups.
- ZIONISTS. Or, as he called them, “Jewish nationalists” whose loyalty would always be to the State of Israel.
- NOBODIES. Okay, this isn’t the word he used, but basically, he painted this second group as being neither fully Jewish – as in, not affiliated with Israel – OR fully Polish. Still, since they were JEWS, they were automatically suspect, and should probably be kept out of civil service, the military, journalism, and other important jobs.
- The third group was the Good Jews. The LOYAL Jews. The ones who disavowed Israel and Judaism, the ones who went all-in on Poland, who passed the moral purity tests, who mouthed the slogans and swallowed the rhetoric and felt suitably ashamed of their embarrassing affiliation with Judaism, Zionism, and Israel. (Hm. This also sounds familiar.)
But Gomułka went FAR beyond dividing Jews into categories. He used those categories as a cudgel, driving a wedge into the student protests. Because CLEARLY, he said, it was the first group, the ZIONISTS, who were stoking these protests. They had engineered this unrest to fracture Poland for their own nefarious ends, as part of a global Zionist conspiracy.
It’s literally The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with slightly updated language. Because Gomułka was very, very careful not to use the word “Jew.” He wasn’t an antisemite! He wasn’t claiming this was a JEWISH conspiracy, just a ZIONIST one. And maybe he genuinely believed that this was effective cover. But funny enough, it was almost entirely Jews who ended up in the crosshairs of the secret police.
True, In the aftermath of the Six Day War, many non-Jewish Poles had expressed admiration for Israel’s military victory, and some of these brave souls did receive unwanted attention from the government.
But mostly, it was Jews who were targeted, regardless of their political or ideological affiliations.
Government-organized anti-Zionist rallies started cropping up all over the country. Newspapers started publishing lists of “Zionists.” Neighbors started snitching on one another.
It was the perfect opportunity to clean house. Anyone who wanted a professional rival out of the way could just denounce them as a Zionist, and ba-da-bing. You didn’t need to PROVE that your colleague or neighbor or whatever actually was a Zionist. Just being Jewish was enough. (Again, I have to say parenthetically: does this sound familiar??)
The rhetoric escalated. Gomułka and his henchmen spread the truly outlandish story that the “Zionists” were working with West Germany to rewrite history and shift the blame for the Holocaust onto the innocent people of Poland!
Now, the Polish government is VERY sensitive to the suggestion – some might call it a historical fact – that many Poles participated enthusiastically in the slaughter of Jews during and after the Holocaust. Of course, some Poles took HUGE risks to hide or otherwise help Jews, and Yad Vashem recognizes roughly 7500 non-Jewish Poles as “righteous among the nations” for their bravery during the Holocaust. But hey, who cares about the intricacies and complexities of history when you’ve got a slogan?
At anti-Zionist rallies, workers vowed to, quote, “clean from Polish soil, with our workers’ fists, all the instigators and leaders of the coup against the working class and peasant government. We will not permit revisionist and Zionists rioters to accuse us of anti-Semitism.” (I’m sure it’s catchier in Polish.) 100,000 people took to the streets to denounce Zionism as “an agent of imperialism” and demand that SOMEONE, quote, “Cut Off the Head of the Anti-Polish Hydra.”
Which looked a lot like purging the country of suspected “Zionists.”
No one was safe. Not Party officials, or soldiers, or professors, or students, or journalists, or civil servants. Not Roman Zambrowski, the very first victim of the purges, removed from his position in the Communist Party on suspicion of “Zionism.” 40 years of loyalty, erased with one unfounded accusation.
Much of the anti-Zionist rhetoric borrowed heavily from old antisemitic tropes. The Jew has always been a malleable figure for antisemites, contorted to fit whatever charge is most effective. In 1968 Poland, Zionists were both TOO Communist while simultaneously acting as “agents of imperialism,” bankrolled and controlled by the “World Zionist Mafia” in the West.
We really are all things to all people. It would be impressive if it weren’t so depressing.
Remember how this started with the censorship of a play? Clearly, Gomułka’s deflection from the student protests worked. By early April of 1968, no one was out in the streets anymore. And by 1971, roughly 13,000 Polish Jews – approximately HALF the population – had fled the country entirely, MOST OF THEM TO ISRAEL. (By the way, here’s an obvious lesson from history: there’s no better way to mint new Zionists than to make the Diaspora a living hell for Jews.)
But here’s the amazing thing.
All of this was accomplished without a single word against “the Jews.”
Because it wasn’t about the JEWS, the government insisted. Jews were MORE THAN WELCOME in Poland! They just had to constantly denounce Zionism and stop feeling ANY solidarity with half the world’s Jews.
Do you see the parallels?
Before we go back to Habibi City, I want to read to you from Hamas’ charter. Not the OG, but the revised edition, circa 2017. Because I was genuinely blown away by the similarities. Here’s article 16, quote:
“Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
Sounds a whole lot like “I’m not an antisemite, but…”
Sounds a whole lot like “I don’t understand Judaism or Jewishness at all.”
Sounds a whole lot like Polish leadership in 1968.
Sounds a whole lot like Habibi City.
So let’s go back to Habibi City, and specifically to the idea that, quote, “To be in SWANA community meant embracing a set of shared beliefs: that Palestinians deserve human rights. That what happened in Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 constitutes a genocide. That social justice and social welfare override capitalist concerns. That to care is nonnegotiable.”
Plenty of Zionists – most of us, actually – believe Palestinians deserve human rights. In fact, no one believed that more than the peace activists and leftists who were slaughtered, raped, and kidnapped on October 7th.
But the moment one points that out, one is ejected from the club. Because by Arafat’s definition, being “SWANA” actually has nothing to do with whether your family is indigenous to the region, maintaining a deep spiritual, political, and cultural connection through thousands of years of exile. It doesn’t matter if your ancestors have lived in the surrounding environs since the 6th century BCE, when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzer dragged the first group of Judean exiles into captivity.
It doesn’t matter if your grandparents spoke Arabic at home, or made jahnun every week, or literally built the financial system of modern Iraq (link in the show notes to more on that). It doesn’t matter if you literally live in the region, in, to quote again, “the land mass currently called Israel.”
Because if you hold the belief that Jews deserve to live independently in their ancestral homeland, that October 7th was not an act of resistance but a parade of atrocities fueled by hatred of al yehud, the Jews, well, you’re not welcome in the cool kids SWANA club. They have decided what it means to be from Southwest Asia and North Africa, and your history, your culture, your identity doesn’t fit.
I’ve visited so many high schools and colleges whose affinity groups for Middle Eastern and North African students simply do not welcome Jews, even though our presence in the Middle East predates Islam and the Arab conquest by literal millennia.
Because – just as in habibi city – membership in these clubs has nothing to do with heritage or history. These affinity groups don’t care if your grandparents were kicked out of Tunis, or Algiers, or Chefchaouen, or Sana’a, or Tripoli. And they CERTAINLY don’t care if your family has lived in Jerusalem since the 15th century. Because their acceptance has never been about indigeneity. It has ALWAYS been conditional on passing moral purity tests. On reiterating over and over that you’re not LIKE the “other Jews.”
You’re a “Good Jew.” A Jew who doesn’t acknowledge that historically, Jews don’t do well as a stateless minority. That in fact, no indigenous Middle Eastern group has historically had a great time in the region after the Arab conquest of the 7th century. Not the Druze. Not the Kurds. Not the Yazidis or the Amazigh or the Copts. Certainly not the Jews.
But to point this out is to fail a purity test. To point out that Jews are indigenous to the region is to renounce membership in the club.
Or rather, to have it stripped from you.
Because this isn’t actually about what political opinions you do or don’t hold. It never has been. It’s about demonstrating that you’re ENLIGHTENED. That you’ll jump through ever-smaller hoops to prove that you belong, even if those hoops require you to deny that to be a Jew is to be a member of an ethnic and religious tribe. That solidarity with fellow Jews is an inextricable tenet of Jewish identity.
I shouldn’t have to say this, because it should be obvious, but I will: when 46% of world Jewry, nearly half of the world’s 15.7 million Jews, live in the, quote, “land mass known as Israel,” that solidarity should not be mistaken for endorsing every action of the Israeli government. It is, first and foremost, solidarity with a people. A people that is from and of the Land of Israel, whose history, holidays, holy books, language, culture, and liturgy reflects that.
But this is how dangerous movements begin. With moral purity tests. With the seductive siren song of belonging.
In medieval Europe, the hot club was “Christianity.” In southwest Asia and North Africa after the 7th century, that club was “Islam.” Today, that club is “antizionism.” A new name for an old thing: the requirement that Jews sever their connection to their homeland. That they give up their right to self-determination. That they accept the definitions and restrictions that OTHER PEOPLE impose on them.
Hostility towards Jews doesn’t always begin with naked hatred. Often it begins with language. Propaganda. Taxonomies.
After wave upon wave of persecution in medieval Spain, more than half the region’s Jews converted to Catholicism. They said the words, ate the wafers, drank the wine. And they were nonetheless pogromed by their neighbors, and then harassed and targeted by the Inquisition. (Links in the show notes.)
A club that demands a loyalty test in the first place won’t stop once you’ve said the magic words. There will always be another purity test. There will always be another demand to prove yourself in new ways.
And you will always, always fail.
In 1968, the Jews who remained in Poland learned this lesson the hard way.
It didn’t matter that they had chosen to live in Poland. That many were dyed-in-the-wool Communists. That many had no opinions on Israel whatsoever. It didn’t matter that some were privately sympathetic to Israel without being activists, or having dual loyalty, or acting as a fifth column, or whatever.
Because it’s not about whether an accusation is TRUE. It’s about moral purity.
In his book The Righteous Mind, the brilliant thinker Jonathan Haidt argues that human beings are primarily social creatures. Groupish, even. Our survival has always been linked to our membership in a tribe. We are engineered to seek belonging. To be in community.
And being in community usually means absorbing its moral norms, as a matter of instinct. Once we’ve chosen our tribe and our membership has become a core facet of our identity, we become REMARKABLY good at defending our tribe’s beliefs and remarkably bad at questioning them. Seeking truth takes a backseat to belonging. Or, more accurately, belonging makes us feel as though we have sole possession of the truth.
As Haidt puts it, we are less like scientists searching for truth than lawyers defending our team. That doesn’t make us irrational. It makes us human.
But that’s exactly how antisemitism functions. How all racial hatred functions.
First, establish an in group and an out group. Then, make membership in the in group conditional on subscribing to certain moral norms. Make membership seem COOL. Make being on the outside seem LAME and CRINGE and EMBARRASSING and WRONG.
It doesn’t matter what language you use. Whether you call someone a “Jew” or a “Zionist.” Whether you accuse them of disloyalty, or of being a fifth column, or of supporting genocide, or of killing your messiah.
The charges change. The animus behind them, the mechanism that enforces them – those stay the same.
And the more seductive your messaging, the easier it becomes to believe that this out-group – these Zionists, these Israelis, these Rothschilds, these Elders of Zion, these baby-killers, these JEWS – are actually dangerous. Menacing. A moral blight. It’s right to exclude them. To shut them out. To pretend they don’t exist.
After the Holocaust, it was EMBARRASSING to be antisemitic. But old hatreds don’t go away so easily. They find new clothing. They find new names.
And those new names don’t even have to be subtle or clever. Because it is NOT subtle or clever to claim that you don’t hate Jews, you just hate Zionists. It wasn’t subtle or clever when Władysław Gomułka did it. It’s not subtle or clever when New York magazine does it, either.
So where does this leave us? What do we do with all of this?
Well, I think we do a few things.
One: we stay informed. We understand history. We have been here before. We have survived.
Two: we recognize groupthink. It’s fine, it’s great, to hold certain moral beliefs. And it’s both socially necessary and deeply human to identify with a tribe or tribes.
But – here’s the but – are our moral beliefs anchored in truth? Or do they exist to uphold a binary between the in group and the out-group? Does our tribe define itself on its own terms? Or does it require a negation of other tribes? Other identities? Other ways of being?
Three: we resist fearmongering. I won’t lie. This moment is concerning. The uptick in groupthink, in the exclusion of Jews, in the moral purity tests, in the heated rhetoric – it’s scary and upsetting. It is.
But – here’s the but – you’ll notice that I didn’t compare this moment to 1939. I compared it to 1968. Because we are not on the cusp of a Holocaust. I do not believe that at all. We are not on the brink of annihilation.
As a community, we should call out the historical patterns. We should recognize warning signs.
But how this story ends is up to us. And that means: pay attention. Know your history. Recognize the playbook. There is nothing new under the sun.
Not the exclusion of Jews. And certainly not our survival against all the odds.