Letters / On “Zionism: A People Reborn”

While I agree wholeheartedly with the underlying sentiment in Eli Valley’s cartoon “Zionism: A People Reborn”—that the accusations of antisemitism against Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani are false, malicious, Islamophobic, and racist—I found the representation of the Zionist accusers unsettling. The decision to depict them as mentally ill, stuffed in a straitjacket, sweating and drooling, implies that Mamdani’s critics are driven by derangement rather than racism and Islamophobia, while simultaneously trivializing the dark history of mental health hospitals. Such institutions were long interwoven with the prison industrial complex, with patterns of abuse of intellectually disabled people and people with severe persistent mental illness, as well as Black Americans, women, and queer people. In this context, the straitjacket is not just a tool of restraint, but also of punishment and torture. It has a place alongside the noose as an object that symbolizes a shameful and violent history. Though I reject the racist remarks being made about Mamdani, I fear that the use of this imagery to refute political points we disagree with creates a slippery slope, reifying a desire for pathologization and punishment in ways that primarily redound to the detriment of marginalized people.