“I’ve met Zohran Mamdani, voted for Zohran Mamdani. I don’t think there’s anything antisemitic about him at all,” says Ezra Klein. He argues the right invokes Mamdani to deflect from its own slide into open bigotry, and uses the moment to analyze a deeper split in how Israel is understood across the spectrum. Klein says anti-Zionism on the left usually flows from universalism, the belief that all people deserve equal rights, and anger at Israel comes from how those rights are denied to Palestinians. On the right, he says the critique of Israel is rooted in ethnostate thinking, where Jews quickly become an ethnic “other” inside America.