'Habibi City,' New York Magazine's salute to anti-SemitismZai

Zaina Arafat

New York Magazine, an evil rag, has just published a special package in its issue of 10 August 2026, under the title “Habibi City,” also presented as a celebration of SWANA New York. The piece of crap sets out to applaud the rising cultural presence of Southwest Asian and North African [SWANA] communities across the city: the parties, the restaurants, the artists, the comedians, the bookstores, all led by a younger generation that has decided the moment is theirs.

The cover photograph shows a gathering at Laylit, held at Elsewhere. The principal essay is the work of the execrable Zaina Arafat. 

Critics, most prominently John Podhoretz writing in the New York Post, have described the cover and its accompanying package as the “evil ‘Habibi City’ cover.” Similar language has appeared elsewhere. They contend that the issue advances an anti-Israel and anti-Zionist outlook, treats Jewish New Yorkers with marked coolness or as an unwelcome presence, resorts to formulations such as “the land mass currently called Israel,” and rearranges the events after 7 October so that the sense of threat is inverted. 

All of this, they note, unfolds against the political backdrop of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York. 

The magazine itself presents the exercise as a cheerful affirmation of SWANA cultural influence and community spirit. The word “evil” is the critics’ own. The dispute is only a few days old, yet it has already provoked considerable objection both online and in the opinion pages. 

Arafat [no relation to Yassar] is a Palestinian-American writer who makes no secret of her strong anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic convictions, although she never has covertly mentioned the latter hatred in public. She describes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms that a range of Jewish organizations, the New York Post, The Free Press and others regard as antisemitic or as adding fuel to an antisemitic atmosphere.

In the lead essay she informs readers that SWANA New Yorkers continue to confront “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism.” Zionism is thereby placed on the same plane as racial prejudice or anti-Muslim hostility. 

She further presents the SWANA cultural flowering as “born out of the pain of the genocide in Gaza” and speaks of people “living under the threat of annihilation” in the period after 7 October.

The wider package, of which her essay is the centerpiece, employs the phrase “the land mass currently called Israel,” an expression critics have called an erasure of Jewish history and of any legitimate claim to the region. Coverage of Jewish and Israeli chefs and restaurants has been criticized as something closer to a hit piece.

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