Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

July 3, 2026

America Offers Jews an Opportunity to Affirm Their Peoplehood in All Its Fullness

Mordecai Kaplan’s vision of America.

In a recent interview, Zohran Mamdani condemned Israel on the grounds that it is a “state that privileges one religion over the other.” The statement is problematic on many levels, and may have been an attempt to weasel out of a question that he didn’t want to answer, but it was the reduction of the Jews to a religious group, rather than a people, that especially stuck in the craw of some commentators. Not coincidentally, it is the standard position of the PLO that Jews share a religion but do not constitute a nation.

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