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| Zohran Mamdani |
New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel, is more popular among American Jews than prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that forty-four percent of US Jews have a favorable opinion of Hizzoner, while 39 percent view him unfavorably.
For Netanyahu, the numbers are 32 percent favorable and 59 percent unfavorable.
The Forward, an independent Jewish nonprofit media outlet, notes that Mamdani took just 26 percent of the Jewish votes in the 2025 election.
His sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism “is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel,” reported the Forward on July 7.
Mamdani has promised to arrest Netanyahu if he visits the city to comply with an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. The PM is slated to speak at the UN General Assembly in September.
It should be an interesting visit.
Following in Il Duce's footsteps... The incomparable Financial Times columnist Ed Luce notes that Donald Trump is the first leader since Benito Mussolini in 1934 to intervene publicly in his national team’s favor.
The US president, who asked for a World Cup review of a red card for a Team USA star striker, was a piker compared to Il Duce.
A Google AI search shows that Mussolini saw the second FIFA World Cup as a PR vehicle to showcase the efficiency and modernization of his fascist state to the rest of the world.
The government poured 3.5M lire to upgrade massive imposing stadiums, such as Stadio Nazionale PNF (National Fascist Party Stadium) in Rome.
Mussolini ordered 300K posters of buff athletes holding soccer balls and doing the fascist salute, and rolled out World Cup cigarette brands and stamps to embed the regime into the tournament’s identity.
Il Duce poached players from other countries, attended every match played by the Italians, personally selected the refs for those contests, and created a massive “The Leader’s Cup” trophy that towered over the World Cup’s counterpart.
And the topper: Mussolini allegedly sent a telegram to Italy’s head coach that read, “win or die.” The efforts paid off as Italy took the title, edging Czechoslovakia 2-1 in extra time.
Adolph Hitler used the Mussolini game plan as a template for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Trump has an opportunity to step up his game during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
JD’s shaky conversion… America, the Jesuit magazine, is surprised that JD Vance hardly used the word “Catholic” in his memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.” He opts for the more generic term “Christian.”
The book is pitched as roadmap to the Vice President’s conversion to Catholicism.
According to America’s July 7 review: “The book reads at times like a political device to attract evangelical Christian votes. Vance describes the erratic Baptist and Pentecostal churchgoing of his Ohio boyhood, in congregations where Republican politics had fused with the faith: sermons on abortion and homosexuality, alarms about Bill Clinton’s morals, family values preached in the abstract while divorce and addiction wrecked the actual families in the pews.”
The church’s social tradition and social teaching are nearly absent from the book, along with the “centrality of the relationship between the believer and the community of believers."
The review notes that “every believer has an individual relationship to God, but Catholic doctrine also stresses the responsibility believers have, both individually and as a community, to the world.”
And that includes migrants, JD. Vance may use the word "communion" in the title of his book, but he is not yet in communion with members of his new faith.
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