Zohran Mamdani is right about what ‘intifada’ means — well, kind of
On a technical level, the mayoral candidate’s controversial interpretation of the word is correct. But that’s only half the story
Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral candidate, following a mayoral Democratic primary debate June 12. Photo by Vincent Alban/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman June 18, 2025
You wouldn’t think that linguistic debates surrounding a geopolitical conflict 6,000 miles away would pull focus from local issues like affordable housing in a hotly contested mayoral race. But this is New York City, after all.
Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has found himself in the hot seat after he did not condemn the use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a term that many Jews understand as a call for anti-Jewish violence, during a recent appearance on the podcast Bulwark. Many were infuriated by what he said next: “And I think what’s difficult also is that the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic, because it’s a word that means ‘struggle.’”
Mamdani is technically correct: According to Margaret Litvin, an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University, the term intifada is “widely and unremarkably used in Arabic texts on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” — including in the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum’s own Arabic translation of its article on the uprising as late as November 2023. (The United States Memorial Holocaust Museum rapidly responded to Mamdani’s comments, saying that he was “exploiting the Museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to sanitize the ‘globalize the intifada.’”)
But as anyone who speaks more than one language can attest, there is a world of difference between the literal translation of a word and its meaning. Mamdani’s statement on the term’s Arabic translation is linguistically accurate. But politically speaking, it’s an unforced error that will alienate many progressive Jewish voters.
In many Jewish and pro-Israel spaces, there is a certain consensus about what the term “intifada” means, understandably informed by the bloody years of the Second Intifada in Israel, during which Israelis suffered horrendous suicide bombings carried out by Palestinian terrorists. The First and Second Intifadas combined claimed around 1,400 Israeli lives, and 5,000 Palestinian ones.
Mamdani has already faced sharp criticism over his record on Israel, which this statement has only increased: It is striking that he did not make any attempt to address the trauma and meaning of this phrase for many Jewish potential voters.
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Mamdani has gained significant ground against during the last weeks of the city’s mayoral primary, condemned Mamdani. “There is nothing complicated about what this means,” he said in a statement.
Cuomo is wrong. Litvin, who is Jewish, explained in an interview that “intifada” is uniformly translated as “uprising” by Arabic scholars. It’s also used by the main Arabic Wikipedia article on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as by Google Translate and DeepL, a translation software engine most commonly used by professional translators.
The term is used so universally precisely because it does not inherently connote violence, Litvin said, but instead refers to the act of rising up against or standing up and shaking off a greater power.
There are few, if any, reasonable substitutes for the word, Litvin said. The USHMM’s Arabic page on the Warsaw Uprising appears to have replaced the term “intifada” with “muquwama,” or “resistance,” sometime in the last 16 months. In Litvin’s view, that’s a mistranslation: “Resistance” implies an ongoing act, she said, while the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was tragically short.
Unlike recent headlines about Mamdani, Litvin said, “it is all very subtle.”
Plus, “intifada” “implies an asymmetry” in power, Litvin said, “which is why it’s used to translate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.” The Arabic word for “a struggle,” for example, “sira’a,” is defined more mutually, as two equal competitors wrestling or fighting.
“Intifada” is also used regularly outside of the Palestinian context. Litvin shared examples from Arabic-language news sources, including one that described the new Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sharaa’s capture of the city of Daraa in late 2024 as “capturing the cradle of the Syrian intifada.”
Another Egyptian news report, speaking about the 2011 Arab Spring, wrote in Arabic that it had been “14 years since the 2011 intifada.”
But while Mamdani’s comments on the Bulwark podcast may have been accurate — and his rival’s declaration that there is only one plausible meaning to the word “intifada” is clearly incorrect — they were still a misstep.
To his credit, Mamdani is nothing but authentic to his beliefs; he speaks the truth as he sees it, even when doing so is politically disastrous. And there’s a significant chance that any voters he lost through this comment were never going to vote for him anyways.
But there are two truths here, and Mamdani only gave a nod to one of them. Yes, “intifada” is a word with many practical and nonviolent uses. And, yes, many Jewish voters — far from a negligible bloc in New York City — have a practical understanding of it as one that incites violence against Jews.
At the end of the day, as Litvin reminded me, translation is an act that takes two parties — the translator, and their readers. She tells her students that “sometimes you have to adapt the original word and think about how the word may not mean the same thing in a new context,” she said.
It seems clear that Mamdani did not think about what the word “intifada” might mean to Jewish people — which implies a lack of awareness about a major part of his potential future constituents.
