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Reihan Salam Is the Opposite of Mamdani
(Wall Street Journal) Tunku Varadarajan - Reihan Salam, 46, has been president since 2019 of the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that specializes in urban policy. His parents came to New York from Bangladesh in 1976 and Salam is a Brooklyn native. He identifies as an American Muslim. "I assimilated into a Jewish-inflected America," he says. "Many of my teachers and mentors were people whose ancestors had come to the country during the great wave of Jewish migration." These were people who believed "in a pluralistic, meritocratic, overwhelmingly positive" vision of America. "These were people who fled pogroms. There was no going back." He recalls the Tenement Museum on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which shows visitors what it was like to be an impoverished Jewish immigrant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "You were in the rag trade, but then your child or grandchild moved up and created this civic and philanthropic energy that came from that feeling of America as a refuge. That is really powerful." The Jewish American story "made everything in my life possible. When I think about the people who just had this incredible openness to talent, I see their mammoth contribution to making America true to itself." The "explosion of antisemitism" after Oct. 7, 2023, and "the so-called anti-Zionist and anti-Israel energy" that is so visible in Mr. Mamdani's New York, is "driven by this incredible envy and resentment and hatred of a community that has enriched American life." The writer is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.