Mayor Mamdani has created a new program—70,000 free tickets, every year, for students, citizens, residents, workers, immigrants, toddlers, grandparents, homeless people, anyone and everyone who lives in the city, to go to the Metropolitan Opera. To see La Boheme, Macbeth, Cosa Fan Tutte, Tosca, The Magic Flute, Samson and Delilah, Aida, Parsifal, and more. Sign up here. While you’re waiting to sign into the lottery, savor these words of John Maynard Keynes, writing at the height of World War II, reminding us what the idea of a “commonwealth” really means: I should like to see that war memorials of this tragic struggle take the shape of an enrichment of the civic life of every great centre of population. Why should […]
In 1753, Britain considered a bill to allow the naturalization of the country’s 4,000 foreign-born Jews. Formally titled “An Act to permit Persons professing the Jewish Religion to be naturalized by Parliament,” the bill was widely known as the “Jew Bill.” Though it initially passed both houses of Parliament, it was repealed after a vicious campaign of antisemitism and nativism, led by the Tories. Today’s Republican Islamophobes in Congress are more brazen. They don’t wait for the public to do their dirty work of name-calling. They have actually titled a bill that would, among other things, strip Muslim citizens of their citizenship, the “MAMDANI Act.” When people say that the historic Jewish Question, which was about whether Jews could ever […]
Two quick points about Mamdani that we need to remember. First, it’s easy to see Mamdani’s victory as one data point, lost amid a sea of other data points. But Mamdani’s victory is a continuation of what I called the Nevada Moment, back in February 2020. The Nevada Moment was the moment when Bernie Sanders decisively won the Nevada primary, powered by a coalition of Latino, Asian, and union voters, with many younger immigrant voters persuading their parents and grandparents to vote for Bernie, despite their skepticism. That moment was immediately overtaken by Biden’s victory in South Carolina the following week, when an older Democratic establishment rallied behind Biden to close ranks against the left, and then covid, when the […]