A New York Public Library event at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on September 22 has ignited a fresh round of controversy after author Benjamin Moser compared Israel to a dog shelter and called Zionists “intellectual thugs,” remarks that have since drawn complaints to a City Council speaker's office and renewed a former Brooklyn assemblyman's demand that taxpayer money stop funding such programming.
Moser appeared at the library's flagship Fifth Avenue building to promote his new book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, published September 22 by Doubleday, which argues that anti-Zionism among Jews is historically distinct from antisemitism, according to a recording cited by the New York Post. During the talk, Moser said American Jews without deep connections to Israel treat the country like a dog shelter needing support, and he accused Israel's supporters of whipping up hysteria over claims that America is unsafe for Jews. He also said the leadership of almost all major Jewish institutions in America supported genocide in Gaza and argued that nothing has made Jews look worse in history than Zionism, claiming Israel was created after Zionists ethnically cleansed native Palestinians and instituted apartheid. He additionally called Zionism's founder, Theodor Herzl, weird.
Moser is not a fringe figure in literary circles. He won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Sontag: Her Life and Work, an authorized biography of Susan Sontag that took him seven years to write. He was a 2025 fellow at NYPL's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, which awards fifteen fellows a year a private office, library access, and a $90,000 stipend for a nine-month residency in exchange for sharing their work through library seminars and public programming, according to the library's own program description.
Khalidi's Questions and a Shared Focus on Gaza
The evening's moderator was Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, described in the Post's account as an anti-Zionist who expressed agreement with much of Moser's views. Khalidi retired from full-time teaching in October 2024 and later withdrew from a 2025 course in protest of Columbia's $200 million federal settlement over pro-Palestinian campus protests, as reported by The Guardian. Per the Post's reporting, Moser and Khalidi focused their conversation on Israel's retaliatory response in Gaza while glossing over Hamas's October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks against Israel.
The pairing of a Pulitzer-winning biographer with a prominent anti-Zionist historian at the city's most storied library branch was enough to draw sharp public criticism. Dov Hikind, the founder of Americans Against Antisemitism who spent 36 years as a Democratic New York State Assemblyman representing Brooklyn's 48th District before shifting to the Republican Party in 2023, blasted the library for giving Moser a forum and argued that taxpayer dollars should not be used to platform him, according to the same Post account.
City Council Speaker's Office Gets Involved
Complaints about the event reached the office of City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who became the Council's first Jewish speaker in January 2026 and has made combating antisemitism a signature focus of her tenure, according to City & State New York. Menin's office contacted the library to learn more about the event, the Post reported. The inquiry lands amid New York City's FY2027 executive budget, which baselines $31.7 million in operating funds for the city's three public library systems — less than one percent of the total municipal budget, per the NYC Office of the Mayor.
The library has defended hosting Moser. Brent Reidy, NYPL's director of research libraries, opened the event by acknowledging that the library and others hold strong and differing feelings on Zionism, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. The institution said in its response that it hosts more than 100,000 events a year, that its programming does not amount to institutional endorsement, that it does not police speech, and that it remains committed to intellectual freedom and First Amendment protections, according to the Post's account.
A Pattern of Programming Across the Spectrum
NYPL noted that it has hosted events across the political spectrum on Israel and Palestine, including a 2025 conversation with Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and writer Franklin Foer, as well as a 2020 event pairing New Yorker editor David Remnick with Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician, human rights activist and former political prisoner. The library also annually celebrates Jewish American Heritage Month, per the same Post report. The May 2025 ruling in Little v. Llano County addressed public libraries' collection decisions, according to the Free Speech Center.
The Schwarzman Building, on 42nd Street, houses the library's humanities research collections. In Broward County, a school district pulled Caldecott-winning author Vashti Harrison from a parent event over a letter about Gaza, a case Hoodline previously chronicled.
For now, no formal action against the library has been announced, and the library maintains that hosting a speaker is not the same as endorsing that speaker's views. Whether the Council speaker's inquiry leads to further scrutiny of NYPL's public programming — or simply closes as one more entry in a fraught national debate over speech, funding, and Gaza — remains to be seen.
