This past week, at a Brooklyn rally for the upcoming Democratic primaries and headlined by Senator Bernie Sanders, NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani gave a well-received speech in support of some of his fellow members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who are in the midst of their own political campaigns for various positions in the NY area.

A moment of notable applause came directly in response to, what most who are familiar with classical antisemitic tropes would consider, concerning rhetoric:

The monsters that we are up against, they take many different forms today... In AIPAC, for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and Netanyahu’s wars. They move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another instead of our leaders turning towards the moral change we all know to be necessary.

On its face, many see this as merely criticism of a political lobbying group, one that spends money in service of the interests of a foreign government, and a critique which, were that truly the case, would have genuine merit. That’s not what’s actually happening, though. Let’s break down the reasons why.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, otherwise known as AIPAC, is a bipartisan political lobbying organization which has spent millions of dollars supporting candidates and policies which benefit the American-Israeli relationship. The organization was founded by the Canadian-born American citizen Isaiah L. Kenen.

The organization, as a political action group which spends money in US elections, is subject to reporting mandates set forth by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). These reports must include the source of AIPAC’s original donors, the amounts raised, and specific organizational spending.

Many have also heard arguments that AIPAC should have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, as an agent of a foreign government. The issue there is that AIPAC, as it’s known to the FEC, doesn’t meet the requirements necessary for it to register under FARA. FARA requires registration only when someone is acting at the order, direction, or control of a foreign principal to perform political activities or propaganda in the US.

AIPAC, though, is an American non-profit that was founded by an American citizen. It’s funded purely by American sources—again, as it’s known to the FEC, which has the discretion to investigate if it believes otherwise. Its goal is to benefit what its American donors believe to be an important part of American foreign policy. As such, AIPAC is an American political organization operating within the current legal requirements for any US Citizen or PAC to lobby members of state and federal government.

But legality isn’t the issue here; language is. If this were a general critique of political spending in the US after Citizens United, that would certainly have merit, but this is a specific targeting of a single group which acts the same as every other legal American lobbying group, with the added point that, according to sources like OpenSecrets, AIPAC doesn’t even breach the top 50 spenders in political lobbying today.

That’s not yet enough to see the full picture, though, because this specific focus on AIPAC has been happening for some time. What’s different now isn’t the focus on AIPAC—it’s the language being used to target them. Consider the following:

If the international Jewish financiers within and without Europe, succeeded in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will be not the Bolshevisation of the world and thereby the victory of Jewry—but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

The claim here is that a shadowy group of wealthy Jews is secretly funneling money to corrupt politicians, in a bid to gain and maintain their own power and cause strife, violence, and even death amongst the innocent populace. This particular quote was from Hitler, in 1939 during his Reichstag speech, only two years prior to the official beginning of the Nazi’s “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question.”

Hitler was far from the only purveyor of this type of antisemitic libel, though; he’s merely the most famous in contemporary studies. Tsarist and Soviet propaganda has, for the last century, spread this exact rhetoric through publications like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery published in 1903 which claimed to contain secret meeting minutes from a meeting of Jewish leaders plotting to take over the world. It’s been exposed as a lie by journalists, courts, and world governments since the 1920s, but it’s been used as a source for antisemitic conspiracies regardless, including by prominent members of the Nazi party in the lead up to the Holocaust, and continues to be published today.

The document pushes conspiracies such as that Jews secretly control the banks, politicians, and media. It claims that Jews brought about the French Revolution, Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, and anarchy in order to weaken European society. This single document has, in the last century, caused so much of the antisemitism which Jews have faced day after day as the historical claims it made are, like an old movie getting a refresh, remastered for a modern audience.

And so today, when politicians rebrand these classical conspiracies which use this same imagery—secret, shadowy groups widely coded in antisemitic tradition as controlled by Jews, using “dark money” to subvert the political process, maintain absolute control over the populace, and sow division, start wars, and murder innocents—it raises alarm bells.

This type of rhetoric is what my great grandfather’s family was forced to escape from. It’s why my family is, today, American instead of Ukrainian. It’s why many Jews are citizens of Israel instead of Eastern Europe. It’s why so many were, tragically, victims of the Holocaust.

This isn’t populist political theory. This is antisemitic rhetoric reborn with an American mask, one which now incites hatred and violence against American Jews. This, coming in the wake of a record-breaking rise in antisemitic hate crimes, isn’t merely unhelpful—it’s dangerous.

When this type of rhetoric is met not with condemnations but with thunderous applause, and as members of the DSA—a group for which Mamdani is a prominent face—are increasingly getting elected across the country, it leads many American Jews to ask the seemingly necessary question, one which has been asked by our ancestors in Diaspora for thousands of years. It’s a question which throughout Jewish history has many times been answered with eventual tragedy.

How much longer until Jews are no longer safe here?