On July 25, Susan Abulhawa — author, activist, and co-author with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's wife — published a post on X claiming that "zios" were responsible for Germany's defeat in World War I and, by extension, for the Holocaust itself. The post boasted about "the extraordinary power they wield" and framed Jewish influence as the cause of their own persecution.

The claim that Jews "stabbed Germany in the back" during WWI is one of the foundational myths of Nazi ideology. It was central to Adolf Hitler's political rise and was used to justify the systematic extermination of six million Jews. More than 100,000 Jews served in the German Army during World War I. They fought, bled, and died for the same country that would later build camps to murder their families.

"This is literal Nazi propaganda," one commenter wrote, noting the military service record that obliterates the "stabbed in the back" myth. Another observed that "lots of people with actual Nazi ideology being revealed in this moment," adding that "the use of 'zios' is usually a good clue." A third called Abulhawa's worldview "a medieval fever dream that is historically illiterate."

And this is where it gets interesting. Abulhawa isn't some anonymous account with twelve followers and a cartoon avatar. She is a published author and a close collaborator of the wife of the mayor of New York City — a city home to more Jewish residents than any other in the world. This is the personal orbit of a sitting American mayor. Not three degrees of separation. One.

The left has spent years lecturing the rest of us about the dangers of anti-Semitism. Every Republican who mispronounces a surname gets a week of cable news coverage and a demand for resignation. But a woman who literally recycles the talking points that powered the Third Reich — and who co-authors books with the NYC mayor's spouse — gets silence. No CNN panel. No New York Times editorial. No statement from the mayor's office.

The reason isn't complicated. Abulhawa's brand of anti-Semitism comes wrapped in "anti-colonialism" and "Palestinian solidarity," which gives it a permission structure that the progressive establishment refuses to revoke, even after October 7 made the consequences of that permission structure impossible to ignore.

Someone in the mayor's inner circle is publishing content indistinguishable from 1930s German state media. The city with the largest Jewish population on the planet has yet to hear a word about it from its own mayor.