אידטיש

Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani
June 27, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET by Michelle Goldberg

In 2023, a branch of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat opened in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, not far from where I live. The eatery trumpets its politics; the seafood section on the menu is headed “From the River to the Sea,” which I found clever but some of its Jewish neighbors considered threatening. An uproar grew, especially online, so Ayat made a peace offering.

In early 2024, it hosted a free Shabbat dinner, writing on social media, “Let’s create a space where differences unite us, where conversations flow freely, and where bonds are forged.” Over 1,300 people showed up. To serve them all, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, Ayat used 15 lambs, 700 pounds of chicken and 100 branzino fish. There were also sandwiches from a glatt kosher caterer, a six-foot-long challah and a klezmer band.

The event captured something miraculous about New York City, which is, for all its tensions and aggravations and occasional bursts of violence, a place where Jews and Muslims live in remarkable harmony. In Lawrence Wright’s recent novel set in the West Bank, “The Human Scale,” a Palestinian American man tries to explain it to his Palestinian cousin: “It’s not like here. Arabs and Jews are more like each other than they are like a lot of other Americans. You’ll see them in the same grocery stores and restaurants because of the halal food.”

Eating side-by-side does not, of course, obviate fierce and sometimes ugly disagreements. But while outsiders like to paint New York as a roiling hellhole, there’s an everyday multicultural amity in this city that’s low-key magical.

I saw some of that magic reflected in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, and especially in the Muslim candidate’s alliance with New York’s Jewish comptroller, Brad Lander. They cross-endorsed, urging their followers to list the other second in the city’s ranked-choice voting system. The two campaigned together and made a joint appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” and Lander was beside Mamdani when he delivered his victory speech.

Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian politics have sparked enormous alarm among some New York Jews, but he’s also won considerable Jewish support. In a poll of likely Jewish voters done by the Honan Strategy Group in May, Andrew Cuomo came in first, with 31 percent of the vote, but Mamdani was second, with 20 percent. On Tuesday, he won most of Park Slope, a neighborhood full of progressive Jews, and held his own on the similarly Jewish Upper West Side.

“His campaign has attracted Jewish New Yorkers of all types,” wrote Jay Michaelson, a columnist at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. The rabbi who runs my son’s Hebrew school put Mamdani on his ballot, though he didn’t rank him first. And while Mamdani undoubtedly did best among left-leaning and largely secular Jews, he made a point of reaching out to others. After he gave an interview to Der Blatt, an ultra-Orthodox Yiddish newspaper, Rabbi Moishe Indig, the leader of a faction of Hasidic Jews, told The New York Times, “As mayor, we wouldn’t have a problem with him.” (Though Indig considered adding Mamdani to his endorsement slate, he ultimately decided against it.)

So it has been maddening to see people claim that Mamdani’s win was a victory for antisemitism. A Republican running for local office in Long Island posted on X that Mamdani will try to shut down “every single synagogue” and Jewish nonprofit in the city. “Evacuate NYC immediately,” wrote the Republican Jewish Coalition, a political group.

Some on the right have responded to his triumph with anti-Muslim hysteria. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a picture of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa, as if Mamdani, a man who campaigned with drag queens and promised public funding for trans health care, wants to impose Shariah law. Her House colleague Andy Ogles called for him to be denaturalized and deported.

I can certainly understand why Jews who see anti-Zionism and antisemitism as synonymous find Mamdani’s rise alarming. There’s no question that he sympathizes with the Palestinians over the Israelis. New York’s past mayors — even the left-leaning Bill de Blasio — supported Israel reflexively. After the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on war crimes charges, Cuomo joined his defense team. Mamdani, by contrast, has said he’d enforce the warrant if Netanyahu ever comes to New York.

One needn’t even be an ardent backer of Israel to have reservations about Mamdani. I’m worried about his inexperience, and I suspect he won people over by making economic promises that he can’t keep. Even though my own stance on Israel’s prime minister is closer to Mamdani’s than to Cuomo’s, I thought it was a terrible mistake for Mamdani to try to justify the phrase “globalize the intifada” on a podcast this month. He’s right, of course, that the literal meaning of intifada is simply “struggle,” but context matters. Mamdani should understand why many Jews find the words threatening, particularly after the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington and the firebombing, just this month, of people in Colorado demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages.

He has consistently denounced antisemitism, and has spoken movingly about Jewish fear, including on the podcast that tripped him up. But Mamdani shouldn’t give the nervous people he aspires to represent any reason to doubt that he’ll protect them. He struck the right tone on the night of the primary, when he promised that while he won’t “abandon my beliefs or my commitments, grounded in a demand for equality,” he would also “reach further, to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree, and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements.”

Ultimately, though, New York’s Democratic primary wasn’t about Israel, no matter how much Cuomo wanted it to be. Mamdani won because of his relentless focus on affordability and our quality of life, and his ebullience, optimism and authenticity. At a time when the Democratic Party is ossifying into a gerontocracy, its leaders dependent on focus-grouped talking points, he’s young and energetic and comfortable speaking extemporaneously. In a cynical and despairing time, he gave people hope.

He benefited, too, from being underestimated. No one is underestimating him now. In the general election, he’ll be facing the disgraced mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent, and possibly an independent Cuomo as well. The attacks on Mamdani during the primary were brutal, but now that he’s a national figure, those coming his way will be worse. His foes will try to leverage Jewish anxieties to smash the Democratic coalition. Adams is even planning to appear on the ballot line of a fake political party called “EndAntisemitism.”

Mamdani’s opponents will try to reduce him to a caricature, some mutant offspring of Jeremy Corbyn and Yahya Sinwar. They will say they’re doing it for the Jews, and plenty of Jews will believe them. But don’t forget that the vision of this city at the heart of Mamdani’s campaign — a city that embraces immigrants and hates autocrats, that’s at once earthy and cosmopolitan — is one that many Jews, myself included, find inspiring. He won in part because he is so obviously a product of the New York we love.