When Zohran Mamdani raised his right hand to become New York City’s mayor on January 1, 2026 he inherited a powder keg wrapped in a political paradox. The Uganda-born, democratic socialist had campaigned as an unflinching voice for Palestinian liberation, promising to treat Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as genocide and vowing to place Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under arrest should he set foot in the city. Yet standing beside him in his administration is Jessica Tisch, a Jewish billionaire heiress whose family fortune exceeds $10 billion and whose personal and institutional ties to Israel run deeper than nearly any public official in America.

Jessica Tisch

The decision to retain Tisch as NYPD Commissioner has transformed what should have been Mamdani’s honeymoon period into a bitter confrontation with his own political base. More than 100 grassroots organizations that supported his insurgent campaign now accuse him of capitulation to the very power structures he promised to dismantle. The controversy exposes a fundamental question about progressive politics in America today. Can a mayor who calls himself a champion of the oppressed govern effectively while empowering someone whose life’s work embodies the surveillance state, whose family bankrolls Zionist causes, and whose professional training included sessions with Israeli military forces?

Jessica Tisch arrived at the NYPD in 2008 as a counterterrorism analyst, but her trajectory through the department reads less like a typical civil servant’s career and more like the strategic deployment of dynastic Jewish wealth into public power. As Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology, she became the architect of the Domain Awareness System, a $3 billion surveillance apparatus that civil liberties advocates describe as Orwellian in scope. The system fuses data from 18,000 CCTV cameras, license plate readers capturing two billion records, 911 emergency calls, arrest records, and criminal databases into a single searchable interface that allows officers to track individuals’ movements across the entire city.

The surveillance network Tisch built extends far beyond catching criminals. Documents obtained by civil liberties organizations reveal that the system has been deployed extensively to monitor mosques, track Muslim community members, and surveil political protesters, particularly those organizing around Palestinian solidarity. In January 2025, training materials Tisch approved instructed NYPD officers to treat keffiyehs and watermelons as potential indicators of antisemitic intent, effectively criminalizing Palestinian cultural symbols and turning everyday items into pretexts for police scrutiny.

Her family background adds another layer of complexity to her role. The Tisch dynasty owns stakes in the New York Giants, has its name emblazoned on buildings across Manhattan including the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and controls Loews Corporation, a conglomerate with interests spanning insurance, hotels, and energy.

The Tisch family’s relationship with Israel transcends typical diaspora support. Jessica’s father, James Tisch, served as chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, one of the most powerful organizations promoting Jewish immigration to Israel and settlement expansion. He continues as an honorary board member, maintaining influence over an institution that plays a central role in Israel’s demographic strategy in the occupied territories.

Jessica Tisch herself has cultivated institutional relationships with Israeli security forces that blur the line between municipal policing and international military collaboration. In 2015, while serving as Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology, she traveled to occupied Palestine to train with Israeli military units.

The NYPD maintains an office in Kfar Saba, Israel, a settlement constructed on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Kafr Saba, whose residents were expelled during the 1948 war. This permanent NYPD presence facilitates ongoing intelligence sharing and joint training between New York’s police force and Israeli security services. In November 2024, shortly after becoming Commissioner, Tisch hosted top officials from Israel’s National Police at NYPD headquarters. She marched in the Israel Day Parade in May 2025, a public declaration of solidarity with the Israeli state at a moment when its military campaign in Gaza had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

In October 2025, Tisch delivered a forceful address at the Anti-Defamation League’s Never Is Now Summit. Her speech defended Israel’s military operations and made an extraordinary claim. She argued that pro-Palestinian protesters’ “target was not and is not Israeli policy or geopolitics, or even the horrors of war, but the Jewish people themselves.”

The Tisch family’s wealth connects to networks that extend into some of the darkest corners of elite power. As this author has previously noted, Laurence Tisch, Jessica’s grandfather, was a core member of the Mega Group, a secretive circle of approximately 20 of North America’s wealthiest Jewish billionaires. Co-founded in 1991 by Leslie Wexner of Limited Brands and Charles Bronfman of Seagram, the group met privately to strategize how their combined fortunes could reshape Jewish institutional life and strengthen ties between American elites and the Israeli state.

The Mega Group’s strategy was explicit. Use concentrated wealth to place trusted allies in leadership positions at major Jewish organizations, effectively centralizing control over the institutional infrastructure that shapes American policy toward Israel. James Tisch’s trajectory perfectly embodies this approach. He rose to chair both the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Agency for Israel, positions that gave him extraordinary influence over how American Jewish communities engage with Israeli government policies.

The Mega Group’s connections have drawn scrutiny for more than their political influence. Leslie Wexner’s relationship with deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who managed Wexner’s fortune and allegedly used that relationship to facilitate sex trafficking, has raised questions about the networks of Jewish power and privilege that the Mega Group represented.

Zohran Mamdani built his political career as an unapologetic opponent of the systems Jessica Tisch represents. As a three-term state assemblyman and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he championed progressive reforms such as fare-free buses, universal childcare, rent freezes, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030.

On Palestine, Mamdani staked out positions that placed him far outside the American political mainstream. He calls Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide. He refuses to endorse Israel as a Jewish state, instead advocating for a secular democracy with equal rights for all inhabitants regardless of religion or ethnicity. He supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which seeks to economically pressure Israel to end the occupation. Most dramatically, he pledged to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli Prime Minister visits New York, citing International Criminal Court warrants for war crimes, though legal experts say he lacks authority to do so.

When Mamdani announced in November 2025 that Tisch would remain as his police commissioner, the decision landed like a betrayal. More than 100 grassroots organizations that had mobilized voters for his campaign issued a joint statement of condemnation. The coalition included Within Our Lifetime, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters across the city, and the Black Alliance for Peace.

Their statement pulled no punches. “Retaining Tisch represents a political alignment with the NYPD’s legacy of racialized policing, surveillance, and repression, and a retreat from the values of justice and liberation that Mamdani’s campaign claimed to champion. … These connections place Tisch at the intersection of the billionaire class, the NYPD’s global footprint, and Zionism.”

The timing carried symbolic weight. On the same day Mamdani announced Tisch’s retention, 28 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. Activists pointed to the contradiction between Mamdani’s campaign promise to arrest Netanyahu and his decision to keep as police commissioner a member of the family that hosts Netanyahu at their Loews Regency Hotel when he visits New York.

Mamdani defended his choice by citing Tisch’s record on reducing crime and rooting out corruption in the Adams administration. He argued that effective governance requires working with people across ideological divides. Tisch, for her part, acknowledged their differences while emphasizing shared goals. “Do the mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t.”

The fragile détente between Mamdani and Tisch nearly collapsed in early December 2025. At the Met Council’s annual holiday gala, Jessica Tisch’s younger brother Benjamin, who serves as CEO of Loews Corporation, publicly called Mamdani an enemy of the Jewish people during his remarks to the assembled donors and dignitaries.

Jessica Tisch moved quickly to contain the damage, personally apologizing to Mamdani’s team for her brother’s comments. The incident exposed the tensions simmering beneath the surface of their professional partnership. It also highlighted the complex dynamics within the Tisch family itself. During the mayoral campaign, Tisch family members excluding Jessica had donated over $1.3 million to super PACs working to defeat Mamdani.

Another flashpoint emerged in November 2025 when approximately 200 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue. The synagogue was hosting an event by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a Zionist organization that promotes and facilitates Jewish immigration to Israel, including settlements in the occupied West Bank. Protesters chanted “Globalize the intifada.”

The NYPD’s response became controversial from both directions. Tisch later apologized to the synagogue congregation during Shabbat services, admitting that police had failed to establish an adequate security perimeter and allowed “turmoil” at the entrance. Jewish organizations criticized the police response as inadequate protection for a vulnerable community. But Mamdani’s office took a sharply different stance. His team issued a statement suggesting the Nefesh B’Nefesh event may have violated international law by promoting settlement activity, which is considered illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. President Donald Trump’s praise for Mamdani’s decision to keep Tisch particularly alarmed progressives. Trump called her “a great police commissioner,” an endorsement that suggested to many activists that Mamdani had moved too far toward the establishment center.

Mamdani’s first days in office have already demonstrated the impossibility of straddling his contradictions indefinitely. On January 1, 2026, he signed executive orders revoking two key policies established by previous mayors. He repealed the executive order prohibiting the city from contracting with companies that boycott Israel, effectively legalizing BDS activity in city business. He also rescinded the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which includes denial of Jewish self-determination as an example of antisemitic speech.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry reacted furiously, accusing Mamdani of “pouring antisemitic gasoline” on the city. Zionist organizations called the move evidence of the mayor’s fundamental hostility to Jewish communal safety. But Palestinian solidarity activists criticized the orders as insufficient, noting that Mamdani left in place the very police commissioner whose department treats Palestinian cultural expression as a security threat.

The executive orders signal that Mamdani intends to advance his pro-Palestinian agenda despite keeping Tisch. But this creates an untenable dynamic where the mayor’s policy directives may directly contradict his police commissioner’s institutional priorities and personal commitments. How does a police force led by someone who trains with Israeli military units and views pro-Palestinian activism as inherently threatening implement policies from a mayor who describes Israel’s actions as genocidal?

Ultimately, this paradox reveals a deeper national sickness where Jewish institutional power consistently corrupts governance from within, creating an unbridgeable chasm between campaign rhetoric and administrative reality. Mamdani’s capitulation to Tisch demonstrates that genuine national renewal is impossible until the pervasive influence of ethnocentric Jewish networks is confronted and dismantled. The core challenge facing both left and right is not merely ideological, but the entrenched power of a hostile elite whose loyalty lies with a foreign nation-state rather than the American people.

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See Part 1 of my review of the essay collection Barnes Against the Blackout.

THE COLD WAR AND BEYOND

In his 1954 essay “The Chickens of the Interventionist Liberals Have Come Home to Roost,” Harry Elmer Barnes introduces the idea of the “totalitarian liberal.” Such men (as exemplified by Arthur Schlessinger Jr.) distinguished themselves from pre-World-War-II liberals in their lust for power and abandonment of principled anti-interventionism. Such men make up James Burnham’s managerial elite as described in his 1941 work The Managerial Revolution, which Barnes discusses. Such people reject “the coexistence of conflicting political and economic systems,” and in so doing promote a “we or they psychosis” which enables elites to wage war in the name of “collective security,” a notion which Barnes finds utterly spurious. This is how it was during World War II and it was no different during the Cold War, according to Barnes, except that both sides were mutually deterred by nuclear weapons.

Barnes further extends revisionism into the Cold War in his 1958 essay “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace.” He remembers how despite standing against World-War-II intervention, patriotic political organizations like America First later fell in line with Cold War intervention “because of the business advantages in industry, trade and finance which an extravagant armament program provided.” President Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex,” in other words. In light of this, Barnes’ passionate belief in the critical importance of revisionism becomes crystal clear. If standing against intervention in 1939 could have spared tens of millions of lives, standing against it during the Cold War could spare humanity a nuclear Armageddon. Indeed, the specter of World War III haunts much of Barnes Against the Blackout.

The final essay in the collection, “How ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity” takes the Cold War comparison even further. The “we or they psychosis” becomes the “war psychology,” which led to the absurdity of “perpetual war through perpetual peace.” This is straight out of Orwell’s 1984, which Barnes calls “the keenest and most penetrating work produced in this generation on the current trends in national policy and world affairs.” In the novel, Big Brother (whom Barnes considers a totalitarian liberal) manufactures phony outrages to prolong phony wars designed ultimately to consolidate very real power for himself and the elite classes. And the masses are either hypnotized enough by propaganda, intimidated enough by government, or distracted enough by entertainment to go along with it. Meanwhile, all reliable historical material is destroyed to disconnect the people from their past—just like what the Blackout Boys tried to do with revisionist accounts of World War II. Barnes sees 1984 as a direct mirror to reality.

And there is much truth to this, as shown by how Barnes uses his “Orwell Formula” to predict the Vietnam War as early as 1952:

The declining public interest in the Korean War has made President Truman and his associates the more willing to accept Churchill’s proposal to shift the main psychological impact of the cold war to Indochina, where it may both revive flagging American fear and excitement and also more directly protect adjacent British interests. The Orwell formula has been faithfully worked out in first directing fear and hatred against Nazi Germany, then against Soviet Russia, next shifting antagonism more toward Communist China, and then moving the chief center of interest in the struggle against the latter from Korea to Indochina.

Despite the clarity and prescience of this essay, Barnes makes a few questionable calls. In keeping with his aversion to the Orwellian doublethink of Cold War psychology and hysteria, he impugns the Truman Doctrine as a sham meant to “rehabilitate Mr. Truman’s fast-fading political prospects.” He also paints the USSR in a more benign light than it deserves—as if the United States were the aggressor during the Cold War and had no legitimate reason to employ deterrence or containment strategies against Communism. And in 1952, perhaps the Soviets did seem to some as unlikely to pose a real threat to American interests. But this was before they detonated their first hydrogen bomb in 1953. This was before their invasion of Hungary, and the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a host of other threatening actions. While Barnes makes excellent points about the injustice of blacking out revisionism, this was nothing compared to the psychological warfare the Soviets waged for decades against its own people which culminated in the terror famines, the Great Terror, and the gulags.

It seems that the Soviet Union during the Cold War made for a much more appropriate nemesis than did Nazi Germany. That Barnes seems to disagree, however, is not my bone of contention here. For all I know, Barnes is correct. However, the time he should have spent dispensing with counterarguments from seasoned cold warriors like George Kennan (who barely gets a mention in Barnes Against the Blackout) was instead spent admiring the life-imitating-art impact of 1984. Interesting and enlightening for sure, but hardly the final word on the subject.

THE JEWS

Direct treatment of the Jews in Barnes Against the Blackout rarely rises above incidental. Many of the “court historians” and “Blackout Boys” Barnes mentions do happen to be Jewish—Herbert Feis, Max Lerner, and Selig Adler are some obvious examples. However, just as many if not more are gentiles, such as William Langer, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Samuel Flagg Bemis. In his essays, Barnes never singles a person out as being Jewish. This certainly protects him from the charge of Jew-baiting, but it also prevents him from drawing conclusions from the fact that while a substantial proportion of anti-revisionists were Jews, none of the nine major revisionists mentioned in Part 1 were—clearly a meaningful data point.

When he does mention American Jews directly, it’s only to let them off the hook for pushing Roosevelt into war. In 1962’s “Blasting the Historical Blackout,” he states flatly that:

Roosevelt did not need any pressure from the Jews to create his interventionism and war policy. There is little evidence that he was deeply disturbed by Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy; he was much more annoyed by the fact that Hitler’s “New Deal” had succeeded in spectacular fashion while his own had failed to bring prosperity to the United States.

Maybe this is true, but it does not mean that influential Jews in media, finance, academia, and politics were not enthusiastic if not crucial facilitators of Roosevelt’s war policy. In his 2013 work How the Jews Defeated Hitler Benjamin Ginsburg describes how American Jews professed fierce loyalty to Roosevelt and did what they could to embroil the United States in a war with Germany. As I stated in my review:

Ginsburg describes how Jews in the private sector also war mongered during this time. The heavily Jewish Century Group called for a declaration of war against Germany following the surrender of France in 1940. The press also aided Jewish belligerence through its pro-Jewish bias. For example, when Lindbergh and the Century Group’s General John Pershing were giving speeches around the same time, the Jewish-owned New York Times gave Pershing front-page coverage and relegated Lindbergh to the back pages.

The Fight For Freedom Committee was more “all out” in its pro-war activities than the Century Group.

The FFF organized a nationwide effort –with the tacit support of the White House and the behind-the-scenes support of the British Embassy—to discredit isolationists and to mobilize public opinion against Germany and in support of American participation in the war.

And by “discredit,” of course, Ginsburg means ruthlessly slander and smear. The FFF thought nothing of labeling leading isolationists and America-Firsters like Lindbergh as Nazis, fascists, or dupes of the Axis. Ironically, they would often question the patriotism of such people as a form of intimidation which preceded the McCarthy era by over a decade. For example, because Senator Burton Wheeler wished to prevent the slaughter of American lives in an unnecessary war, the FFF declared that he was a “twentieth century Benedict Arnold.” The FFF also spied upon and collected compromising information on isolationists in Congress, such as Hamilton Fish. As it turned out, the FFF discovered that Fish’s people were distributing pro-German literature and were in contact with German agents. One of Fish’s secretaries went to prison for that. At the same time, however, Ginsburg informs us that the FFF was in constant contact with British agents. Just as insidiously, the FFF and other groups planted moles at isolationist rallies in order to disrupt them.

So perhaps President Roosevelt didn’t need Jews to change his mind, but he certainly needed them to change the minds of the millions of Americans he tried to deceive. Unfortunately, Barnes entirely avoids this point. His minimal treatment of the Jewish Holocaust in Barnes Versus the Black also deserves comment. He exerts almost no effort in placing it within his blackout vs. revisionists framework. Instead, he brushes it aside by saying that the Germans ultimately suffered more than the Jews did. He’s also skeptical that the Jewish Holocaust was the enormous atrocity it was purported to be:

There is little in the history of mankind more horrible than the sufferings of the Germans expelled from their eastern provinces, the Sudeten area, and other regions, some four to six millions perishing from butchery, starvation, exposure, and disease in the process. Their sufferings were obviously far more hideous and prolonged than those of the Jews said to have been exterminated in great numbers by the Nazis. The tragedy of Lidice was re-enacted by the Czechs hundreds of times at the expense of the Sudeten Germans during the expulsion. The Morgenthau Plan, which was inspired by Stalin and his associates and passed on to Henry Morgenthau by Harry Dexter White and other Soviet sympathizers, envisaged the starvation of between twenty and thirty million Germans in the process of turning Germany into a purely agricultural and pastoral nation.

Barnes never voices any support or approval of Adolf Hitler. He admits the man was at times cruel and erratic; then again so were Churchill and Roosevelt. As far as honest statesmanship goes, however, Hitler was actually on a higher plane than any of the Allied leaders. This is a demonstrable fact, one that is borne out by the diplomatic history of the 1930s as revealed by Hoggan. One does not have to love or even like Hitler to see that of all the major world leaders of the time, he was the least responsible for war. Barnes also refuses to demonize Hitler, and actually gives space for arguments claiming that Hitler had been too soft while conducting the war. To Hitler haters, this may sound like apologism, but it really isn’t. In “Blasting the Historical Blackout” Barnes dismisses Hitler’s Jewish policy as “folly” and correctly notes that it was this, rather than any foreign policy, which engendered anti-German hatred in Allied countries. He also recalls proudly how Rabbi Stephen Wise—the rabid, Hitler-hating Jew who led the worldwide Jewish boycott against Nazi Germany—once reprinted articles by him decrying Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Barnes even states that for a decade after 1945—which is smack dab in the middle of the Barnes Against the Blackout timeline—he had wished that Hitler had been assassinated in 1938 or early 1939, which would have avoided the catastrophe of a second world war.

In light of this, it cannot be said that within the pages of Barnes Against the Blackout Harry Elmer Barnes is anti-Semitic. He’s not philo-Semitic either. Instead, like any true historian, he’s anti-Falsehood and pro-Truth. Of course, he may be right or wrong, but never does he relinquish the discipline and objectivity required of great historians to keep civilization tethered to its past so it cannot go astray in its future.

CONCLUSION

There are many minor themes running through Barnes Against the Blackout which contribute to its value. Most notable is the topic of World War I revisionism, for which Barnes was an outright champion. His 1926 work Genesis of World War made him famous in this regard. Barnes often compares and contrasts revisionism from both World Wars and demonstrates how suppression and groupthink after the latter was much more insidious and comprehensive. He also offers examples of revisionism going back to antiquity.

Like Orwell, Barnes likes to invent neologisms and slogans. My favorites are “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” “globaloney,” the “Blackout Boys,” and the “Smearbund.” His 1962 essay “Revisionism and Brainwashing” is especially poignant in its descriptions of how modern Germans had been brainwashed into accepting their own culpability and shame. Some of the most ardent anti-revisionists of Barnes’ day were post-war Germans themselves, whom, Barnes suspects, feared the equivalent of a third Punic War. Barnes also drops historical Easter eggs everywhere. Did you know that the Roman theologian Paulus Orosius smeared the ancient pagans just as outrageously as court historian Herbert Feis smeared the Japanese? Or how about how Renaissance Scholar Lorenzo Valla proved that the 4th-century Donation of Constantine decree, which solidified the secular power of the Pope, was in fact an 8th-century forgery? It took Europe 350 years to come around to this fact. Barnes hopes it won’t take Europeans nearly as long to come around to the forged history of World War II.

If Harry Elmer Barnes has any personal bias in Barnes Against the Blackout it’s one that favors peace and an honest accounting of history. Because the so-called leaders of the free world gave us neither in the 1930s and 1940s, tens of millions needlessly perished. And with globalist liberalism still supreme today, being the root cause for mass third-world immigration into America and Europe, we continue to suffer from the effects of the catastrophe of World War II. Barnes himself said it best: “Revisionism is not only the major issue in the field of historical writing today but also the supreme moral and intellectual concern of our era.”