FILE – Jewish New Yorkers protest antisemitism within the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist assaults.
Photograph by Dean Moses
Meeting Member Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist representing Astoria, received the June 2025 Democratic Major to change into the celebration’s nominee for mayor of New York Metropolis. He has emerged as some of the polarizing figures not solely in New York however nationally, particularly amongst Jews.
For a lot of Jewish New Yorkers, Mamdani poses an existential menace that isn’t rooted merely in coverage disagreement, however in what his rhetoric and alliances symbolize in a unstable second for Jewish identification, security and belonging in Democratic politics.
To say Mamdani is an outspoken critic of Israel — which he has repeatedly charged with “genocide” because the Hamas terrorist assault of Oct. 7, 2023 — is an understatement. Mamdani’s whole political worldview was formed by his obvious hatred for the Jewish state; the one piece of laws he solely authored throughout his time in Albany was the “Not on Our Dime” invoice, which was worded in such a manner that New York synagogues may very well be sued into slicing all ties with Israel.
Whereas this aim is shared by his extremist comrades within the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), it has struck a nerve with Jewish New Yorkers throughout the political spectrum as deeply alienating.
To many Jews, his continued fixation on Israel, coupled along with his delayed acknowledgement of the trauma from the Oct. 7 assaults, felt like an intentional omission, denying our ache and our proper to collective grief. It suggests Mamdani will not be a politician who will transcend simply saying he’s involved with our private security and safety, ought to the threats emerge from his fellow vacationers within the anti-Israel motion.
Mamdani’s management throughout the DSA, his refusal to help a two-state answer to the disaster within the Center East, and his outright rejection of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state have contributed to a hostile civic local weather for the Jewish group.
Bullying, harassment and intimidation of Jews at universities, in cultural areas, and even in authorities areas has pressured pro-Israel Jewish New Yorkers to really feel as if we’ve been marginalized. When Mamdani and his allies within the New York Metropolis Council body Zionism as colonialism, they implicitly forged a cornerstone of contemporary Jewish identification, and for almost all of Jews, as morally suspect.
Their try and drive a wedge between Jews by demarcating who’s welcome primarily based on their affiliation to the all-consuming anti-Israel trigger feels to many like a line has been crossed from reliable (although harsh) political critique into identity-based antagonism.
Mamdani’s defenders argue he’s standing up for human rights, not focusing on Jews. However in a metropolis the place antisemitism has surged, intent issues lower than impact.
His continued insistence, alongside along with his allies, that one way or the other Jews are the perpetrators and never the victims of genocide, and that anybody who doesn’t maintain the identical view is “complicit,” are amplified by way of social media and motion areas, and echo different international narratives that foment Jew hatred. Phrases do have real-world penalties, because the firebombing in Boulder, the capturing at Washington, D.C.’s Jewish museum, and the assaults on Jewish New Yorkers holding the doubtful honor of being the targets of the plurality of all hate crimes within the metropolis, plainly present.
In the end, it’s that Zohran Mamdani represents a motion more and more comfy with excluding Jews who won’t disavow Israel. For New York’s Jews, Mamdani and the DSA’s rise seems like a betrayal of the promise of belonging from town we love.
Sara Forman is the chief director of the New York Solidarity Community (NYSN), a membership group dedicated to empowering New York’s Jewish group in state and native politics, and treasurer of Solidarity PAC.
