A New York Times feature alleging “many Jewish voters” are supporting Zohran Mamdani quoted a witches’ brew of far-left radicals, including a campus activist who once joined a violent protest at Middlebury College as well as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D., N.Y.) anti-Israel rabbi Rachel Timoner. At least three interviewees, meanwhile, either volunteered or worked for Mamdani’s campaign.
Timoner, who leads the Reform Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn and told the Times she knows “a lot of Jews who are really excited” about Mamdani, has said that for her “whole career I’ve spoken about the [Israeli] occupation.” She’s repeatedly championed those views in the Gray Lady.
Just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Timoner penned an op-ed declaring that “Palestinian self-determination is essential” and that the “land needs to be shared.” On July 20, she told Times columnist Ezra Klein that “We need to care with all our being for Palestinian freedom because we actually are not whole or free until Palestinians are free.”
A few days later, she was arrested for blocking traffic during rush-hour while protesting outside the Israeli consulate in New York City. She was also arrested in 2021 at a climate change protest.
Schumer, who has embraced Mamdani following his Democratic primary victory in New York City’s mayoral race, has acknowledged that Timoner has influenced his political decisions. The New York Democrat credited her for his decision to denounce Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the Senate floor in March 2024.
Timoner has also pushed far-left positions in her role as a rabbi. Her recent initiatives have included “a study series on systemic racism in America” and a “sukkah about the refugee experience,” according to her Beth Elohim biography. She was also part of a “Dismantling Racism Team which was part of the successful campaigns to Raise the Age of criminal responsibility and to win bail reform in the State of New York.”
Another Jewish New Yorker, Emily Hoffman, told the Times she was “proud to vote for [Mamdani] as a Jew” while attending an event organized by the far-left Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), a group she’s promoted in the past.
JFREJ supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. It also supports abolishing the police, disrupting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a Mamdani bill in the state legislature aimed at punishing nonprofits that work with Israel. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has called the group “out of touch” with “the majority of the Jewish community.”
Hoffman also has a long history of supporting far-left New York Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former congressman Jamaal Bowman, Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán, and Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher. Hoffman is also fond of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).
In her day job, Hoffman is an attorney for Equal Justice Works, a social justice nonprofit where she works to “remove and challenge barriers to employment faced by people with criminal records.” She’s married to Alex Kane, a frequent writer at the anti-Zionist publication Jewish Currents.
The Times also quoted Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an anti-Israel group that blamed Israel for Oct. 7 and has been broadly condemned by the ADL and other Jewish groups. JVP has said it considers itself “the ‘Jewish wing’ of the Palestinian solidarity movement.”
In 2017, JVP honored Rasmea Odeh—the Palestinian terrorist behind the 1969 bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket that killed two Israelis—and called her a “feminist leader” during its National Membership Meeting. Elias Rodriguez, the terrorist who in May gunned down a young couple in Washington, D.C., promoted the anti-Zionist group soon after Oct. 7.
Miller, during a July 2024 Democracy Now! appearance alongside notorious anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, said, “For so many years, there has been wall-to-wall, bipartisan, unquestioning complicity in Israel’s atrocities and human rights abuses against Palestinians.”
At least three Jews the Times spoke to either volunteered for Mamdani or worked for his campaign directly.
Ruby Edlin, a Mamdani canvasser, told the Times that Jews like her would not be bound by “some obsolete litmus test.”
Edlin graduated from Middlebury with bachelor’s degrees in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, and political science. Her undergraduate thesis examined the “First Amendment through the lens of feminist theory,” according to a biography from the Brennan Center for Justice, where she works on “election security and disinformation” and is the chair of its union.
As a Middlebury student, Edlin participated in and defended a violent protest against conservative academic Charles Murray. Agitators pushed and shoved Murray, then-74, and his faculty interviewer Allison Stanger suffered a concussion, the Times reported.
Shortly thereafter, Edlin signed a petition that read: “By elevating bigotry and engaging with it in open debate under the misguided view that all ideas must be respected, we risk elevating biased opinions with no solid, factual foundation into the realm of ‘knowledge’ and affirming the unconscious biases many hold.”
Ben Sadoff told the Times he knocked on 1,000 doors for Mamdani. He also holds the position of “Legislative Lead” for Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D., N.Y.) through JVP, according to an online biography.
Less than two weeks after Oct. 7, Sadoff signed a petition calling “for an end to Israel’s settler colonial, genocidal violence against the Palestinians” and “for an end to the occupation.”
