Know Your Enemy: Zohran, the Jews, and Reckoning with Gaza

Know Your Enemy: Zohran, the Jews, and Reckoning with Gaza

Matt and Sam talk to Peter Beinart about Zohran and Islamophobia, Jews and antisemitism, the genocide in Gaza, and more.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

Rather than focus on a single topic or text, we wanted to have a wide-ranging conversation with our guest, Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at Jewish Currents and author of the recent book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. We start by discussing the appalling wave of Islamophobic attacks against Zohran Mamdani during the last weeks of his victorious mayoral campaign, the short-sighted embrace of such bigotry by too many American Jews and Jewish institutions, the current iterations of antisemitism roiling the right, religious tradition and progressive politics, changing your mind, and more.

Listen again:

Elon Musk, the Jews, and the ADL (w/ Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, & Peter Beinart) (2023)

Sources:

Zohran Mamdani, My Message to Muslim New Yorkers—and Everyone Who Calls This City Home, YouTube (2025)

Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025)

Mark Mazower, On Antisemitism: A Word in History (2025)

Arwa Mahdawi, Mamdani’s Mayoral Race was Marred by Unhinged Islamophobia. It’s Not Going Away Soon, The Guardian (2025)

Romanus Cessario, O.P., Non Possumus, First Things (2018)

George Washington, To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island (1790)