Michael Powell on Mamdani, Anti-Zionism, and the New Socialism

In 2020, at the height of peak woke, then-New York Times sports columnist Michael Powell decided to make a career zag, abandoning sports to begin covering what he calls the “third rail beat” of the rising tide of progressive left illiberalism: controversies around race, identity, political correctness, and the increasingly censorious, authoritarian and oppressive cultural milieu of progressive institutions. It was a dangerous career move at a time when the New York Times was purging itself of perceived apostates like James Bennet and Bari Weiss. But Powell fearlessly dove headfirst into the verboten world of woke era authoritarian excesses because he believed mainstream journalists were avoiding these topics not because they were unimportant, but because they were controversial - and uncomfortable. 

Now at The Atlantic, in March Michael authored a  piece entitled “Where Mamdani Has Refused to Moderate,” in which he delves into the charismatic Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated New York City mayor's refusal to moderate on Israel, even as he's compromised on policing and other hot button left wing shibboleths. So we asked him to join us on BCB to unpack how the Israel-Palestine issue is increasingly animating - and defining - the blue city left. 

But before we get into the meat of the issue, Powell recounts a 2020 dust-up when New York's DSA chapter disinvited Black Marxist scholar Adolph Reed Jr. over insufficient deference to identity politics, an early warning sign, in retrospect, of the fractures now playing out over Israel. Then we turn the conversation to Mamdani, and we explore the question of why anti-Zionism has risen, so fast and so sharply, to become the defining issue of the rising DSA left, and what this shift says about what it means to be a “socialist” in latter day blue cosmopolitan America.

We discuss how Mamdani's stance reflects a broader generational shift in which support for a two-state solution has given way to absolutist "river to the sea" politics, even as Zionism's own socialist roots in the early decades of the Israeli state get erased from memory. Drawing on his own campus reporting about the Gaza protests at Columbia University, Powell describes an environment where framing Israelis as "colonizers" forecloses any real dialogue. We then discuss whether "Zionists are the new TERFs" — in other words, the left's newest litmus-test heresy — and dig into the decline of AIPAC's political muscle and the rising anti-Israel currents on the populist right (Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes) that complicate any simple left-right narrative.

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Michael Powell, "A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk about Race, It Ignited a Fury," New York Times, August 14. 2020. 

Michael Powell, "Where Mamdani Has Refused to Moderate," The Atlantic, March 14, 2026.

Michael Powell, "What Mamdani Doesn't Know about Tenants," The Atlantic, Feb. 11, 2026.

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