The New King Who Did Not Know
January 9, 2025 – כ׳ טֵבֵת תשפ”ו
New leadership often brings with it uncertainty and big questions. This week, we read one of the most politically charged verses in the Torah: “A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Yoseph.” (Exodus 1:8) With that sentence, memory collapses. Gratitude dissolves. History is severed from responsibility. Yoseph—the immigrant who saved Egypt from famine, stabilized its economy, and ensured its survival—is erased not because his story was unknown, but because it was inconvenient.
The Torah’s language is deliberate. The king did not forget Yoseph. He chose not to know him. This is willful amnesia, and it becomes the moral precondition for oppression. Once Yoseph’s legacy is denied, the Israelites can be reframed—from contributors to threats, from neighbors to a demographic problem. Policy follows narrative. Fear replaces fact. Power and subjugation masquerade as necessity.
That dynamic feels painfully familiar today.
In the moments following his swearing-in ceremony, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swiftly revoked executive orders issued by his predecessor, Eric Adams, including those referencing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. A revocation that was framed as a civil-liberties correction—an effort to prevent the misuse of state power and protect free speech. Those concerns warrant serious consideration. But for many Jews, especially in the aftermath of October 7 and the rise in antisemitism, the message landed differently: that Jewish experience, fear, and history were again being treated as insignificant.
Many in the Jewish community feel that the new Mayor’s policy choices demonstrate his apparent unwillingness to acknowledge—let alone assuage—the fear and unease that his candidacy brought, despite his having remained outspoken and committed to the safety and security of the Jewish community of New York, the largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel. Leadership, especially in moments of fracture, requires more than ideological consistency; it requires empathy. Instead of reassurance, many Jews have experienced his actions as confirmation of their deepest concerns.
That sense has only been reinforced by Mayor Mamdani’s repeated insistence on foregrounding his anti-Zionism, even when doing so appears unconnected to the policy question at hand. The call to reassess the long-standing academic partnership between Cornell University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology—a collaboration rooted in scientific research, innovation, and education rather than politics—felt to many like a symbolic escalation rather than a substantive reform. Why target a partnership devoted to medicine, engineering, and climate research, if not to make a broader ideological statement? Why threaten this partnership, centered at the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, which is reported to generate significant revenue for NYC through tech innovation, job creation, and successful startups, contributing hundreds of millions in economic impact annually (e.g., $768M in FY2024) and projected to reach $1.5 billion by 2030, fostering a vibrant tech ecosystem and attracting global talent to the city? Especially for a politician who seeks additional funds to reduce costs and increase affordability?
This is the moment when the Torah’s warning sharpens. When a leader repeatedly chooses gestures that alienate a particular community—when they underline opposition rather than build trust—it raises unavoidable questions. Is anti-Zionism here a means to justice, or has it become an end in itself? And if so, what happens to the Jews who understand Zionism not as supremacy or silencing, but as peoplehood, memory, and responsibility? According to recent surveys, eighty percent of American Jews feel that the Jewish State of Israel is important to their identity as Jews. Mayor Mamdani seems to ignore the importance to our community of the first Jewish State in two thousand years. And that ought to concern us all.
To ask these questions is not to deny Mayor Mamdani’s commitment to equity or civil rights – nor should we see him as a modern-day Pharaoh attempting to enslave or oppress the Jewish people. It is to ask whether leadership that claims to stand against exclusion can afford to disregard how its actions are received by a minority with a long and painful history of being told that its fears are exaggerated, inconvenient, or politically expendable. Pharaoh, after all, did not announce himself as a villain. He framed his policies as prudent, necessary, and even protective. The damage came not from his rhetoric alone, but from his refusal to recognize the humanity and history of those standing before him.
Judaism insists that memory is a moral obligation. Leaders are judged not only by what they oppose, but by whom they choose to see. To govern while consistently signaling disregard for Jewish concern—especially in a moment of global antisemitic resurgence—is to risk becoming, however unintentionally, a new king who did not know Yoseph.
And that is precisely the leadership failure Parashat Shmot warns us against.
Here, nuance matters.
The Reform Movement has articulated a principled position that resists false binaries. We support the IHRA definition as an essential educational and analytical tool—one that helps institutions recognize contemporary antisemitism, including when it disguises itself as anti-Zionism. At the same time, we oppose codifying IHRA into law, precisely because legal enforcement risks chilling speech, flattening complexity, and undermining democratic norms. This is not hedging. It is a deeply Jewish approach—holding tension rather than collapsing it. One could make a strong case that IHRA was never intended by its framers and early adopters to be codified as law, but rather as a guideline and tool for evaluation.
But rejecting codification is not the same as rejecting memory. When IHRA itself is dismissed, rather than debated thoughtfully, when antisemitism is minimized as a distraction from “real” justice work, when Jews are told, implicitly or explicitly, that their vulnerability must wait its turn—that is when we hear echoes of Pharaoh’s logic. A politics that prides itself on moral clarity can still choose not to know Yoseph.
This danger is not limited to the political left.
In Israel, many of us have been engaged in a sustained campaign to resist and push back against the tyranny of Itamar Ben Gvir. That effort is not a side issue; it is a moral imperative. Ben Gvir’s embrace of Jewish supremacism, his incitement against Arab citizens, and his willingness to weaponize state violence corrode Israel’s democratic foundations and desecrate Judaism itself. Opposing him is not anti-Israel—it is an act of Zionist responsibility, rooted in the belief that Jewish power must be accountable to Jewish values, which is what led Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to say in a High Court of Justice filing that Netanyahu must be ordered to explain why he hasn’t fired Ben Gvir, accusing the far-right minister of systematically abusing his powers.
The same is true of recent pieces of legislation proposed by MK Avi Maoz, which seek to abolish the recognition of Reform and Conservative conversions for the Population Registry and to abolish the Grandchild clause of the Law of Return. They are both scheduled for discussion soon by the Governmental Committee for Legislation. These initiatives aim to erase entire populations—LGBTQ Israelis, non-Orthodox Jews, and others—from full belonging. Passing such a law would create an unprecedented rift between Israel and the Jewish world and would undermine the very idea of Israel as the home of all Jews. It represents another form of deliberate unknowing: the refusal to recognize the pluralistic, evolving Jewish people who actually inhabit the State of Israel.
Seen together, these moments— in New York and Jerusalem—reveal the Torah’s enduring insight. The greatest threat to justice is not disagreement; it is erasure. Not argument, but amnesia.
Shmot teaches that oppression begins long before forced labor. It begins when leaders detach present policy from historical responsibility. When they decide that certain stories no longer matter. When memory becomes optional.
The Reform Movement’s stance—supporting IHRA without codifying it, fighting antisemitism without surrendering democracy, opposing Minister Ben Gvir and MK Maoz while remaining fiercely committed to Israel—models a different kind of leadership than Pharaoh’s. It insists that memory is not a weapon, but a compass. That Jewish safety and democratic integrity rise or fall together. That liberation cannot be built on selective recognition.
Judaism commands us: Zakhor. Remember. Remember Yoseph. Remember what happens when leaders choose not to. And remember that the work of justice—ours and others’—begins not by erasing hard truths, but by facing them honestly.
That is the warning of Parashat Shmot. And it is the test of leadership in every generation.