Tuesday, April 29`, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 35
by Jacob Kornbluh, Forward
Zohran Mamdani’s stance on Israel may seem untenable for a mayoral candidate aspiring to run the city with largest Jewish population outside of Israel, yet he is emerging as the top contender against former governor Andrew Cuomo, the frontrunner in a crowded field of candidates despite being forced to resign over sexual harassment allegations he denied. As Mamdani courts Jewish voters, who trend centrist on Israel but are seeking an alternative to Cuomo,
Mamdani is standing firm on his leftist position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mamdani, who is Muslim, says his forthright communications strategy will win over many Jewish Democrats in the same way it is connecting with younger voters, who say they would choose him over Cuomo in recent polls.
Mamdani, 33, said he got that impression from an older Jewish voter who offered his support following a candidate forum at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in January.
Mamdani cited a recent Siena Research survey showing that the top four priorities for Jewish voters in the mayoral race are eldercare, paid family leave, affordable housing and combating discrimination.
The Siena poll, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points, showed Mamdani in first place among voters aged 18-49, while Cuomo held a commanding lead among older voters.
That generational divide may also reflect differing views on the U.S. role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During our 40-minute interview, the conversation was briefly interrupted by a Columbia student who spotted Mamdani through the window and stopped in to greet him. “We are all huge fans,” she said.
Compared to the other candidates in the race — Brad Lander and Scott Stringer, who are Jewish, and Cuomo — Mamdani is less connected to the broader Jewish community.
Mamdani defended his stance on the Gaza war and his support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel, which some in the pro-Israel community see as an assault on the legitimacy of the Jewish state’s existence. Mamdani, who told Politico that he recognizes Israel as a sovereign state, maintained that his support for BDS is principled and guided by his belief in international law and “ending complicity with the violation of it.”
Mamdani initially demurred when asked in the interview if he would implement any form of Israel boycott as mayor, saying that his focus would be on bread-and-butter issues. Pressed, he said he would end some Adams administration policies he regarded as illegal, but did not go into detail.
“If there are ways in which Mayor Eric Adams has supported the violation of international law, I would absolutely bring that to an end — because I think what New Yorkers deserve is a city in compliance, whether it’s legal compliance with campaign finance or its compliance with international law,” he said. “That is something I would do.”
Mamdani condemned the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas as a “horrific war crime” and described the celebration of the killing of civilians by some of the attendees at the NYC-DSA rally as “not befitting of a movement supporting universal human rights.”
Mamdani attended some of the pro-Palestinian protests across the city just after Oct. 7 and participated in a hunger strike outside the White House to call for a permanent ceasefire in November 2023. He has defended the campus protests. Earlier this year, Mamdani confronted Trump’s border czar Tom Homan over the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and a leader in the pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
Some of those protests were marred by harassment of Jewish students and the display of antisemitic posters. A poll released last year showed that an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers believed the campus protests required authorities to intervene and crossed the line into antisemitism.
Before Oct. 7, Mamdani came under fire for introducing a bill that was titled “Not on our dime!: Ending New York funding of Israeli settler violence act.”
What Jews are saying
David Greenfield, a former member of the City Council who is now the chief executive of Met Council, said he isn’t impressed by Mamdani’s charm offensive.
“Mamdani has been fanning the flames of antisemitism, and now he wants us to believe he’s the firefighter,” Greenfield said, pointing to Mamdani’s positions on the war in Gaza, and recent comments Mamdani made linking the affordability crisis to U.S. military aid to Israel. “He can speak to as many Jews as he likes, but it won’t change the fact that he’s promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories,” Greenfield said.
Mamdani clarified his affordability remarks, saying he doesn’t believe the $3.8 billion in annual funding for Israel is directly tied to a lack of funding for housing.
