Zohran Mamdani, the self-described “democratic socialist” poised to become New York’s next mayor, doesn’t talk much about Israel on the campaign trail. He focuses on housing, policing, and wages — the city’s pressing local issues. Yet his long record of fervent anti-Zionist activism hangs in the air — troubling less for what it reveals about his platform than for what it reveals about the political culture that now embraces him.

A decade ago, a politician who had founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, praised the “globalize the intifada” slogan, and refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state would have been a radical outlier. Today, such views no longer shock. Indeed, for a large swath of the Democratic Party, they confer a distinct moral status. On much of the activist left, hostility to Israel — and to Jews who support it — has become a badge of conscience and enlightenment.

That moralization of prejudice has precedent. A century and a quarter ago, another handsome, eloquent populist harnessed resentment toward Jews in a different great city. Karl Lueger, Vienna’s reforming mayor from 1897 to 1910, was urbane and witty, a modernizer whose vocal antisemitism lent an air of civic rectitude to anti-Jewish bigotry. Lueger didn’t invent antisemitism, but he made it fashionable — and in doing so, he showed how an ugly prejudice could be mainstreamed as ethical clarity.

He had already shown just how powerful that formula could be two years before becoming mayor. On Election Day in 1895, Lueger, then the popular leader of Austria’s Christian Social Party, made an appearance at a Vienna polling station. Among those in the crowd was Theodor Herzl, a journalist with the Neue Freie Presse, one of Vienna’s most distinguished newspapers. For Herzl, who had developed a keen interest in antisemitism while covering the trial of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris a year earlier, the euphoria with which Lueger was greeted was a revelation:

“Wild cheering; women waving white kerchiefs from the windows,” he recorded in his diary. “The police held the people back. A man next to me said with loving fervor: ‘That is our Führer.’ More than all the declamation and abuse, these few words told me how deeply antisemitism is rooted in the heart of the people.”

Vienna in those years was one of the world’s great Jewish centers. Roughly 9 percent of its population was Jewish, and Jews were deeply woven into the city’s cultural and economic life. It was in Vienna that Sigmund Freud probed the human mind, Gustav Mahler conducted the Philharmonic, and Arthur Schnitzler wrote some of the first great Modernist plays. Yet beneath that brilliance ran currents of envy and resentment, which Lueger didn’t hesitate to exploit.

His Christian Socials won control of Vienna’s government that year, but Emperor Franz Joseph — alarmed by their antisemitism — refused for nearly two years to give the necessary royal assent Lueger needed to become mayor. In 1897 the emperor finally relented, and Lueger formally took office.

In many ways he was a fine mayor. Lueger modernized Vienna’s public services and beautified the capital. But he also normalized Jew-baiting, elevating open contempt for Jews into a mark of civic virtue and sophistication. He mocked the Hungarian capital as “Judapest,” excluded Jews from the municipal administration, and maligned the opposition party, the Social Democrats, as a tool of Jewish and anti-Christian subversives. The mayor smeared Jews as “specialists in vile profits,” “the people who murdered God,” and “expropriators of the native population.”

Blending populism, moralism, and grievance, “Handsome Karl” made antisemitism not just respectable but politically potent — even exhilarating. One historian summarized his achievement: Lueger “developed a xenophobic and antisemitic cultural code that gave his supporters a sense of identity.”

The parallel between Vienna’s politics then and New York’s now isn’t in personalities or policies but in the cultural mood. Lueger flourished as genteel society turned its anti-Jewish prejudices into a point of pride. Mamdani rises in an era when anti-Zionism plays a similar role — a language of conscience that too easily curdles into contempt.

Mamdani has said explicitly that opposition to Israel was the issue that first drew him into politics. Speaking to a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference in 2021, he recalled his campaign as a Bowdoin College undergraduate to shut down study-abroad programs to Israeli universities. It was, he said, a way of “bringing the issue of Israel/Palestine/apartheid to Bowdoin — to make it front and center, harder to ignore.”

As a candidate for mayor, he has never disowned that record. He remains proud of founding a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization notorious for its anti-Israel zealotry and its role in turning many campuses into hostile environments for Jewish students. He refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He has excoriated New York politicians who participate in the city’s annual Israel Day parade. He defends the phrase “globalize the intifada” — widely understood as a call for violence against Jews — even as Jews, who make up 10 percent of New York City’s population, were targeted in a majority of hate crimes last year.

In Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, Lueger’s antisemitism was a political asset, not a liability. He and his admirers insisted he wasn’t motivated by hate but by love — love for Vienna, for the working man, for true Christian values. On today’s progressive left, anti-Zionists insist just as heatedly that they are not haters of Jews — that it is only “occupation,” “settler colonialism,” and “genocide” they abhor. The vocabulary changes, but the pattern endures: prejudice is disguised as principle, hatred is baptized as virtue.

As recently as 10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a politician with Mamdani’s radical record could be elected mayor of New York. But the cultural current has shifted. On the activist left, hostility to Israel now signals decency and enlightenment. Mamdani didn’t have to make anti-Zionism the centerpiece of his campaign; it had already become an accepted credential.

Well before Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitism had begun seeping back into American life. But the past two years have made it sickeningly clear that the postwar taboo on open Jew-hatred has collapsed, especially among the young. What is most disturbing about the New York race is not that Mamdani has made Israel or Jews the centerpiece of his campaign — he has not — but that his long record of anti-Zionist agitation no longer raises eyebrows.

Vienna’s tragedy began when antisemitism stopped shocking polite society. A century and a quarter later, can the most cosmopolitan city in the world be sure it’s immune to the same corrosion?