The initial Jewish institutional response to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory has been appropriate. “Zohran Mamdani’s elevation to Gracie Mansion reminds us that antisemitism remains a clear and present danger, even in the places where American Jews have long felt most secure,” said William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “There can be no compromise with an ideology that demonizes or ostracizes Jews and Israelis.”
Daroff pledged vigilance on behalf of the umbrella organization. So did the Anti-Defamation League, which announced “the launch of a comprehensive initiative to track and monitor policies and personnel appointments of the incoming Mamdani Administration and protect Jewish residents across the five boroughs during a period of unprecedented antisemitism in New York City.”
These are good indications that Mamdani’s feet will be held to the fire if he attempts to enact the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel policies he ran on.
But part of the reason for the alarm among Jews—and elation among anti-Jewish activists and voters—is that Mamdani’s win itself crossed a certain line because he flaunted his rageful obsession with Israel and used baldly anti-Semitic language and won anyway. Jews (and non-Marxists) know that Mamdani can be restrained in office to some degree. But putting Mamdani aside, there was something unnerving in the unrestrained joy it gave New York Jews’ friends and neighbors to see Jew-baiting used to such electoral effectiveness in the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
It will be great if Mamdani is prevented from carrying out his Jews-on-the-brain agenda. It will be greater still if that happens because of the stiffened spines of American Jewish organizations. But what Mamdani’s election says about what is acceptable to New Yorkers will be much harder to undo. The future can be stymied, but the past cannot.
A good example of this is Mamdani’s campaign plank regarding BDS. The boycott-Israel movement has far more failures than successes, at least in America, but that’s because here it isn’t actually about trade policy. BDSniks in the U.S. don’t expect to destroy Israel’s trade position. BDS in the U.S. is first and foremost about making American Jews feel unwelcome and multiplying the number of environments that are explicitly hostile to them.
On Election Day, Mamdani reiterated his support for BDS on MSNBC. It is through that lens that he sees, for example, an opening to end economic partnerships with Israeli institutions, the most prominent of which is the Technion collaboration with Cornell University. That partnership was opened initially in 2012 by the Michael Bloomberg administration and permanently sited in 2017 under Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Aside from the educational benefits, the partnership has produced over 100 start-ups, 84 percent of which are based in New York, according to the Technion.
Mamdani also wants to end the New York City-Israel Economic Council and divest the city’s pension funds from Israel.
The point here is that although he has leveled even more wild-eyed threats—he vows to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example—Israel and the Jews are the only subjects he talks about when he talks about populations he’d like New York to freeze out. Mamdani is not a “human rights activist,” he’s an anti-Israel extremist who uses the language of human rights to crusade against the one Jewish state. This single-minded obsession made even some of his allies in the legislature uncomfortable.
When Mamdani tried repeatedly to push a bill that would outlaw certain Jewish charities, for example, he failed to garner enough support because of how clearly targeted the legislation was. State Sen. Alex Bores, who backed Mamdani but not that particular bill, told the New York Times: “I view with suspicion bills that are written to target one specific country when they could easily be written broadly to apply to a problem.”
That is the sum total of Mamdani’s campaign—it’s about one country, one people. That creepy obsession made it impossible to argue that Mamdani is merely concerned about human rights or conflict prevention or anything else. That Mamdani ran on this obsession with Israel and won is going to make it difficult for Jews to see New York as the city they once knew.
