Honesty matters - The Jewish Standard

Misinformation is all around us.

The times we live in are volatile, to the point where any editor on Earth 2 reading a manuscript that straightforwardly reported on what’s happening right here right now, presented as fiction, would reject it as way over the top.

But it’s all real.

And so is the misinformation that naturally accretes around the weirdnesses of our world, because it’s human to make up explanations and to believe them. As Abe Foxman pointed out in this paper last week, misinformation is dangerous, and social media amplifies it. We have to come together if we are to make it through these challenging times at least relatively unscathed, but the random scattering of elaborated halftruths that turn into rancid lies makes coming together much harder.

How can we come together if we don’t trust each other?

This was brought home to me this week by posts online that baldly misled readers about something I know about.

My synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, where I live, hosted a forum for candidates for the Democratic mayoral primary.

Our primary is — to use a technical term — insane. We have ranked choice voting, which means that we can vote for up to five candidates for the Democratic nomination, and not only must we pick five from the 15 or so who are running, but we must list them in order of preference. When the voting is done, a complicated system figures out which candidate has gotten the most votes.

It’s not intuitive. To understate.

B’nai Jeshurun hosted a forum to which eight candidates showed up. The forum was sponsored by more than a dozen organizations, including the Marlene Myerson JCC Manhattan, and one of its two moderators was Amy Spitalnik, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. The point was for the candidates to answer questions relevant to the Jewish community.

It was an informative evening, and it made the task of picking five candidates a little less Sisyphean.

One of the candidates was Zohran Mamdani, who is anti-Zionist and could be understood to be antisemitic (a label he denies, but of course he would).

A Jewish online influencer attacked the entire event. She posted a video of Mamdani speaking, and what he said was anti-Zionist and is unlikely to have won many votes in that room, or among anyone streaming the program. She neglected to mention that there were seven other candidates there — one of them spent a good deal of his allotted time attacking Mamdani — and that the point of the evening was not to promote Mamdani but to give us voters some idea of candidates’ views of Jewish issues.

Her position — that the way to deal with candidates whose views we don’t like is to pretend they don’t exist — seems unlikely to have the electoral outcomes we’d like. It might work with someone who’s clearly doing badly in the race, but polling shows Mamdani running second after Andrew Cuomo, and he’s gaining strength. If we as a community are to vote against him, we have to know who he is and what he stands for. (And to be fair to him, he did show up at a shul for a meeting with Jews, and although what he said was distasteful, he was polite as he said it.)

All that misinformation does is makes us mistrust each other. How does that help? It doesn’t.

Honesty, respect, truthfulness, and decency prevail eventually, or at least they have until now. May that continue to happen, and happen soon. Because how much more of this can we take?

–JP

Opinion

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