Mamdani’s Anti-Israel Animus is Spreading
Over the summer I visited with a group of congregants and asked them about their foremost communal concerns. The most repeated answer: Mayor Mamdani.
I have met the mayor — a smart, charismatic politician whose social and economic platform captured the excitement of more than a million New Yorkers.
Yet for many Jews, his mayoralty has been defined by his antipathy toward Israel, and their own anxiety and fear. Antisemitic hate crimes rose 8.5% during his first seven months in office and represent 57% of all hate crimes in the city.
He is neither solely nor directly responsible. But the history of the past three years has proven that assaults on Jews escalate when Israel and its supporters are demonized. While there is much to be lauded in his strategy to combat antisemitism, and while he has made good on his promise of a strong police presence protecting Jewish institutions, the strategy’s failure to address the impact of anti-Israel rhetoric on Jewish safety (let alone how his own has further roiled an already volatile climate ripe for violence and threats of violence) is deeply disappointing.
But part of this temple group’s uneasiness about the mayor involved something else: why so many people, especially young people, voted for him. “How can we get them back into the fold?” one mother asked.
I answered, first, that we should never count people out of “the fold” because of how they vote; and second, that we need to hear the concerns they were addressing with their votes.
Roughly one-third of New York’s Jews voted for Mamdani. Many young professionals — and not just young professionals — are struggling with the cost of living in New York. For them, the mayor’s pledge to address affordability resonated. And some voted for him as a vote against the status quo, or the actions of the president and Congress and the courts. For some, his criticism of Israel was inconsequential because Israel, sadly, is inconsequential to their Jewish identities.
But others voted for him because they, too, are deeply troubled by the conduct of Israel’s hard-right government, which has sought to eviscerate checks on its power, enshrine aspects of Jewish law as national law, and undermine any hopes for future coexistence with the Palestinians by rejecting U.S.-led negotiations on security in Gaza and, until recently, turning a blind eye toward settler terror in the West Bank.
Across America, House and Senate candidates on the ballot this November watched how Mamdani leveraged popular anger over the war in Gaza to galvanize support during his mayoral run. And now they, themselves, are campaigning on divorcing American foreign policy from Israel’s security needs.
Congress has the right to debate foreign appropriations, and candidates to argue their positions. Yet when Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed called Israel “an illegal apartheid regime,” asserting that “every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values,” he was not addressing policy. He was delegitimizing Israel.
I love Israel deeply, and I, too, believe Israel would be better served should next week’s election there unseat its current coalition.
But to those who voted, or may yet vote, for any candidate here to protest the government there, a word of caution: do not imagine that elected officials who object on principle to Israel as a sovereign Jewish nation will change their minds with a change in Israel’s leadership. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is but a proxy for their real target — Israel as a Jewish state.
