Earlier this month, New York Mayoral Candidates gathered at the B’nei Jeshurun Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West side, for a Jewish community hustings event.
While each politician present was quizzed on a variety of issues, arguably the greatest focus was on the youngest candidate present, Zohran Mamdani. Asked repeatedly by the chair of the panel whether, if elected, he would continue to pursue a BDS policy against Israel, the 33-year old state assemblyman shied away from a direct response, consistently pivoting to the phraseology of bringing the city “into compliance with international law”.
It was an oddly coy line for Mamdani to take, given his comments during the 2020 Mayoral race. At that point, during an online event with the Adalah Palestinian-American advocacy organisation, he decried what he described as “toothless” questions about whether elected officials supported the right to engage in BDS, rather than asking whether they supported BDS itself.
“I think too many Progressives have gotten off without any accountability on where they stand on these kinds of issues”, he said at the time, recommending that people should “ask the questions that you want to have answered and having people have to reckon with that and then squirm as they answer it and then give you a bullshit answer, and then follow up with them.
“Like these Mayoral candidates that they’re running right now in New York City, if you want to know how to put pressure – there are so many, I think there’s more than 30 that are filed – ask each one of them what they think about BDS, and not what they think about the right to engage in it, because people will try and conflate the two.”
Mamdani is handsome, charismatic and polite. He also appears – to many supporters of Israel, at least – to be breathtakingly disingenuous.
Elsewhere during the B’nei Jeshurun hustings, he confirms that as Mayor, if Benjamin Netanyahu visited New York, he would attempt to serve the International Criminal Court’s arrest for the Israeli Prime Minister. Noting that America is not a signatory to the ICC, he tries to equate his stance on the issue with that of the San Francisco Mayor (now Governor of California) Gavin Newsom, who issued marriage certificates to gay couples before gay marriage was legal in the United States. “There are times when courage is required”, he solemnly informs the Synagogue audience.
He dodges the question of whether he would visit Israel as Mayor by saying that he is not sure whether he would be allowed to go, given Israeli legislation prohibiting the entry of anyone who supports BDS – which effectively answers the earlier question about whether he continues to support a boycott. When asked whether Israel has a right to exist, his answer is an immediate “yes” – to which the crowd does not respond positively, knowing that the swiftness of his response is because Mamdani does not believe it should specifically exist as a Jewish state. When asked about this on television, Mamdani’s answer has been that he is “not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else…. Equality should be enshrined in every country in the world.” Somehow, however, none of the many other countries which specifically define themselves as states adhering to a different religion seem to be in his firing line.
As this article was about to be published, Mamdani went one further. Asked about the phrase “globalise the intifada”, he refused to condemn it, going so far as to claim that the US Holocaust Museum used the word “intifada” in its Arabic translation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This led the museum itself to release a statement saying “Exploiting the Museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to sanitize ‘globalise the intifada’ is outrageous and especially offensive to survivors. Since 1987 Jews have been attacked and murdered under its banner. All leaders must condemn its use and the abuse of history.”
And yet, this man – who has previously described himself as “anti-Zionist”, who as a student co-founded his university’s “Students for Justice in Palestine” chapter, and who is a regular attendee and speaker at anti-Israel marches – is somehow a serious candidate to lead the city with the world’s largest Jewish population. How exactly did this happen?
Zohran Mamdani (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Dmitry Shein)
While the actual election is in November, we will know who the next Mayor will be later this month. A look at the candidates who have officially qualified to participate in the race shows us why. Almost all of them, including Mamdani and the current front-runner, Andrew Cuomo, are running as Democrats. Whoever triumphs in late June will face two challengers. There is the deeply unpopular incumbent Mayor, Eric Adams, who was originally elected as a Democrat but is now running as an independent after being indicted last year on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations (the Trump administration Department of Justice has since instructed federal prosecutors to drop the charges). The second is the Republican candidate by default, Curtis Sliwa, who was also the Republican candidate last time around and lost then by a landslide to Adams. Barring an act of God, the winner of the Democratic primary on 24 June will be the person sworn in as Mayor immediately after midnight on 1 January.
As things stand, the person being sworn in will either be Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamdani.
Cuomo’s candidacy, on the face of it, is bizarre. The scion of a New York political dynasty who served as Governor of the state for a decade, his political career seemed over after he resigned from office in 2021 in the wake of numerous allegations of sexual misconduct. But three of the last five American Presidents have been elected despite facing sexual misconduct allegations, and so Mr Cuomo must have gambled that New York – at a city, rather than state level – was ready for more of him. That gamble appears to be paying off. He is the front-runner in the democratic primary race, with polling in late May putting him at 35 percent. For want of a better term, he is the Establishment Candidate – even if many people who might be described as part of that Establishment are less than thrilled by his political resurrection.
The then-New York State Governor, Andrew Cuomo, speaking at the inaugural ride of the Second Avenue Subway, 2016 (Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin)
Mamdani, much to the chagrin of some of his fellow contenders, has established himself as the progressive candidate. Closely aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America far-left caucus, he is promoting policies which greatly appeal to many on the Left – free city busses and city-owned grocery stores being two examples – even as, in common with many far-left politicians, his funding details for such proposals are somewhat murky. From polling at just 1% in February, he is now comfortably in second place at 23% – and the way that NYC’s election system works means that his chances of victory, while still slim, are certainly possible.
Since 2019, the NYC Mayoral elections – both primaries and the general election – have been run using a ranked preference system. Simply speaking, voters are asked to rank their choices in order of preference – first, second and so on. If, once all the first-choice votes are counted, no candidate has cleared 50 percent, the candidate to come last is eliminated and all those who ranked that candidate first now have their second-choice votes allocated to the respective remaining candidates who they marked down as second, and so on until a candidate reaches above that 50 percent mark. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that, as lower placed candidates are eliminated, Mamdani picks up enough votes to pass Cuomo.
This can lead to Mayoral candidates endorsing other candidates as other choices to vote for in ranked preferences. Last week, another progressive Mayoral contender, Jessica Ramos, one of the first New York politicians to call for Cuomo to resign as Governor in 2021, and who earlier this year had described him as a bully whose “mental acuity is in decline”, chose him over Mamdani, saying that “only one of them has experience, toughness and the knowledge to lead New York for what’s about to come”. But Mamdani has widespread support from within left-wing circles, including Progressive New York household names like Alexandra Ocasio Cortes and Cynthia Nixon. And Mamdani and Brad Lander, the Jewish comptroller of New York currently running in third place, have cross-endorsed each other.
But how is the Jewish community in the city reacting?
Borough Park, Brooklyn
The sheer size of New York City’s Jewish community can be hard for those living in other diaspora countries to comprehend. To put things in perspective, the Jewish population of the city itself – the five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island – is approximately four times the size of the entire Jewish population of the United Kingdom. Jews make up 10% of the city’s population. This means that unlike almost any other city in the world outside of Israel, the Jewish vote is significant and has the very real ability to sway Mayoral elections.
The term “Jewish vote” – as with any other religious or ethnic bloc – is something of a misnomer, because it is not unified by any means. As anywhere else, Jews hold positions across the political spectrum. Jewish people with more broadly left-wing politics are more likely to be registered democrats – the only people able to vote in the primary in question. Among those, there will be both Zionists and anti-Zionists, as well as those who are broadly pro-Israel but for whom Israel is not the most important issue affecting their vote.
All this would explain why a poll in mid-May of Jewish Democrats saw a fifth currently opting for Mamdani (Almost a third were backing Cuomo). Lander, who has been criticised for his previous close connections to far-left anti-Zionist organisations like ‘JFREJ’ (Jews for Racial and Economic Justice), scored 18%.
Meanwhile, the strictly Orthodox Chassidic community, which makes up roughly ten percent of the Jewish total in the city, has not uniformly lined up behind Cuomo. For various Chassidic sects, while Israel as a geographic locale is of acute spiritual importance, the Israeli state is viewed either with ambivalence or hostility. Voting priorities are far more centred on issues such as municipal funding and safeguarding religious education. The two largest Chassidic sects – Satmar and Bobov – have declared first-choice support for Cuomo, with the former Governor also receiving backing from a number of other sects in the Chassidic stronghold of Williamsburg. But over in another strictly Orthodox Brooklyn bastion, Borough Park, many others are expressing support for an alternative candidate, Adrienne Adams.
Much of the information on Chassidic voting patterns is being reported by Jacob Kornbluh of the Forward, by far the most knowledgeable journalist on the subject. In a piece earlier this week, he wrote that he had been told that “Cuomo met with just a handful of Hasidic leaders and neglected deeper outreach to the broader network of schools and administrators who manage turnout operations” in Borough Park.
Two different ads published by Chassidic organisations. The one on the left, from Chassidic sects in Williamsburg, endorses Andrew Cuomo as number 1 pick for Mayor in the Democratic primary. The one on the right, from Borough Park, ranks Adrienne Adams first (Credit: Twitter, @jacobkornbluh)
Kornbluh also said that there was still significant Orthodox support for the incumbent Mayor Adams (not related to Adrienne Adams), who won the Democratic primary in 2020 in part due to strong Chassidic backing, but that given Mr Adams is now running as an Independent, leaders have been looking at alternate Democratic primary candidates. He also noted that Cuomo has been apologising for his actions in 2020, when many felt the then-New York Governor had singled out Chassidic communities when criticising a perceived lack of adherence to Covid-19 regulations.
As things stand, it is still very unlikely that Mamdani will eke out a primary victory against Cuomo – although one suspects that if the primary was being held later in the summer, it might be a different story. But traditional supporters of Israel in New York could – and should – be worried at how well Mamdani has done. Since 2001, Quinnipiac polling has asked US voters whether, based on what they know about the situation in the Middle East, their sympathies lie more with the Israelis or the Palestinians. In the weeks after 7 October, that polling showed 61% in support of Israel and 13% in support of the Palestinians – an all-time high for Israel. This week, the same question resulted in 37% for Israelis and 32% for Palestinians – now at an all-time low for Israel. Among Democrats, that question in June 2025 found that 60% sympathised more with the Palestinians, versus just 12% who sympathised more with Israel.
For well over half a century, New York’s Mayors – Democrat, Republican or Independent – have been proudly Zionist. They have spoken at Israel-supporting Gala dinners and have marched in the annual Israel parades down Fifth Avenue. Apart from anything else, it was good politics. Mamdani’s candidacy, however, looks like the latest example of a significant political shift – both in New York and across America – which may leave many long-time committed Jewish Democrats with difficult choices. In the UK, British Jews traditionally had supported the broadly left-wing Labour Party, but that support plummeted when the Party elected a far-left, vehement anti-Zionist as its leader. While the two countries are far from identical, it would be foolish to rule out a similar scenario playing out in America during the years to come.
