Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani answers questions at a town hall meeting sponsored by UJA-Federation of New York and its Jewish Community Relations Council, Manhattan, May 22, 2025. (Screenshot)
By Ron Kampeas
July 1, 2025
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — Zohran Mamdani turbocharged his upset victory in the New York mayoral Democratic primary by seemingly spending time with everyone in the city’s five boroughs.
Now pro-Israel Jewish progressives want some face time with the 33-year-old State Assembly member, who backs boycotting Israel and downplays Jewish concerns over the term “globalize the intifada,” now that he is one step closer to leading the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
In interviews, Jewish Democratic activists said Mamdani’s victory last month is not the national disaster for the century-long Jewish-Democratic alignment that Republicans are making it out to be — but it’s not good either.
“He’s going to be the mayor of New York, which is the largest Jewish population in any city in the world,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a group that campaigns for Democrats in the Jewish community. “He needs to understand that his defense of the phrase ‘globalize the intifada’ isn’t just concerning, it’s unacceptable.”
The prospect of candidates, including for federal office, emulating Mamdani’s Israel-critical postures is unsettling, according to pro-Israel insiders.
“Someone like Mamdani winning in the biggest city in America definitely has national implications,” said one major donor to Democrats who asked not to be identified in order to speak frankly.
A staffer for a Congressional Democrat said Mamdani’s victory complicated efforts by Democrats to raise the alarm in Jewish circles and beyond about the rise in harsh criticism of Israel among progressive politicians.
“There has been concern with amongst the established Jewish community and pro-Israel community with the left flank of the Democratic Party in terms of Israel for a while, and more mainstream, center-left Democrats have been trying to reassure them that there’s still a place for them in the party, and this just makes it the task that much more difficult,” said the staffer, who asked for anonymity to speak frankly. “I don’t think it’s like the end of the world, but it makes that task harder.”
The pro-Israel left tolerates and even indulges in a certain amount of criticism of Israel, especially of the unpopular prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the right-wing extremists in his coalition. But Mamdani’s positions and rhetoric — especially his defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which critics of the phrase says endorses deadly attacks on Jews — particularly irks Jewish progressives.
“It’s a consensus across the Democratic Party that something like ‘globalizing the intifada’ is deeply offensive, and it would behoove Mamdani to actually acknowledge that,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of J Street, a Jewish Middle East policy group that emphasizes a two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is often critical of the Israeli government..
“Those of us who lived through an Intifada don’t want to see it coming to a street near us, right?,” said Ben-Ami, who lived in Israel during the first 1987-1993 Intifada. “That’s not an attractive option.”
Mamdani has Jewish defenders, chief among them New York Comptroller Brad Lander, who also ran in the primary and who cross-endorsed with Mamdani. Lander describes himself as a Zionist who can work with Mamdani on confronting New York’s affordability crisis and against polarization.
“We are not going to let anyone divide Muslim New Yorkers and Jewish New Yorkers,” Lander said on primary night. “Our safety, our hopes and our freedoms are bound up together, don’t get it twisted.”
Some pro-Israel donors to the Democratic Party say their worries about Mamdani’s victory are mitigated to a degree by its circumstances. Mamdani faced a deeply flawed rival in scandal-plagued former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the democratic socialism he embraces barely resonates outside of New York City and a handful of other metropolitan centers.
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, who founded the Israel Project media outreach group at the launch of the Second Intifada, and who has donated to multiple Democratic candidates over the years, said the party was in dire need of candidates more palatable than Cuomo.
“We need to do a much better job in nurturing young talent that is really smart and helping them understand issues and convincing them to run,” she said of pro-Israel Democrats, noting how Emily’s List cultivated feminist candidates at the local and state level. “It is very hard to get good people to run, because it’s such a toxic environment, and the sacrifice is just so huge.”
Ben-Ami urged Democrats to emulate Mamdani’s campaign style, which included savvy social media videos of the candidate meeting with New Yorkers of all stripes in every borough of the city.
“It’s very direct to camera, switching the narrative, at times, doing a lot more interviewing and listening to people on the street, making that your message, rather than 30-second ads that are highly produced and repeated over and over again,” he said. “It’s just a much more native and intuitive way of communicating with anybody under 40.”
Mamdani’s victory, at least for now, is more the exception than the rule, say Jewish Democrats, who pointed to primary victories over members of the “Squad,” the small faction among Democrats that is hypercritical of Israel.
“We’ve seen the moderates or center left folks win in Democratic primaries, like last year in Michigan, like this year in New Jersey, the extreme candidates who ran on Israel lost,” said Ira Forman, a longtime director of the National Jewish Democratic Committee, the JDCA’s predecessor.
He referred to a primary victory last year by incumbent Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan, and Mikie Sherrill’s recent win in the New Jersey gubernatorial primary, where her second-place rival was deeply critical of Israel. Incumbents Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri, both harsh critics of Israel, also went down to defeat to pro-Israel moderates in primaries last year.
National pro-Israel groups are staying out of the general election, according to spokespeople for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, J Street, the JDCA and Democratic Majoriity for Israel.
That’s in part because major pro-Israel political donors in New York are considering how best to keep Mamdani from winning the general election in November — chief among them hedge funder Bill Ackman.
“I don’t think national people are going to be putting money into it,” said the pro-Israel Democratic donor who asked not to be identified. “There’s enough New York money to go around.”
Soifer said JDCA is seeking a meeting with Mamdani. “It’s a moral obligation that he ensure that all New Yorkers feel safe and secure and considering how many Jews are in New York, he’s going to have to change the way he speaks about this issue,” she said, referring to Israel and particularly his history with the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
Days before his primary win on June 24, Mamdani defended the phrase “globalize the intifada” in a podcast interview with The Bulwark, calling it “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He later said he wouldn’t use such language.
On Sunday in a post-primary victory interview on “Meet the Press,” Mamdani refused three times to condemn the phrase — but instead of defending it, he couched his refusal in a reluctance to “police” language, and said he “heard” the fears of Jewish New Yorkers who revile the phrase.
Mamdani did not make the Palestinian issue front and center while campaigning — indeed, when asked about it he often pivoted to his favored issue, affordability in the country’s most expensive city.
And yet, unlike a number of other progressive Democrats who, once elected, have emerged in recent years on the national stage as strident Israel critics, Mamdani did not try to obscure or downplay his identification with the Palestinian cause during his campaign. He stood by past statements backing the boycott Israel movement and his pledge to arrest Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should the Israeli prime minister, accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, visit the city while he is mayor.
He has also sought to address outrage arising out of his statement a day after Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, massacring close to 1,200 people.
His Oct. 8 statement mourned the loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives, although Israel had barely launched its retaliation, and lacerated Israeli leaders for declaring war, without mentioning the Hamas attack that launched the war — or even naming Hamas.
He has moved away from that one-sidedness since then. In the weeks before the primary election and in an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on election eve, Mamdani called Hamas’ attack a “war crime.”
The Democratic pro-Israel donor said Mamdani’s shifts indicate a possible willingness to pivot, comparing him to Michigan’s Thanedar, who was sharply critical of Israel when he was first elected in 2022, but who shifted to a pro-Israel posture after the Oct. 7 attacks. An effort was underway, the donor said, to get Democratic leaders to weigh in.
Those appeals appeared to pay off on Sunday when New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, demanded clarity from Mamdani on “globalize the intifada” in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”
“Globalizing the intifada, by way of example, is not an acceptable phrasing,” Jeffries said. “He’s going to have to clarify his position on that as he moves forward.”
On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Jewish Democrat who welcomed Mamdani’s victory without specifically calling out his views on Israel, told Jewish Insider,
“Sen. Schumer condemns the phrase ‘Globalize the Intifada’ and believes it should not be used because it has such dangerous implications.”
While calling out rhetoric they think is dangerous and unhelpful, few of the mainstream liberal supporters of Israel, unlike a number of Republcans, are willing to call Mamdani antisemitic. In New York, however, some local pols weren’t so reticent. “When someone spends years relentlessly targeting the world’s only Jewish state through legislation, boycotts and protests — while remaining silent on the abuses of regimes like Iran, China or Russia — it’s not principled criticism, it’s antisemitism, plain and simple,” Sam Berger, a Democratic Jewish state lawmaker from Queens, said in a statement on the eve of the primary.
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who worked in communications for a number of prominent New York Democrats — including former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who endorsed Mamdani — said it was critical to lower the temperature by sticking to the facts.
“The piece that feels most important to name is the urgency of leaders recognizing how rhetoric like ’globalize the intifada’ is now directly and increasingly fueling violence against Jews,” she said. “That’s different in some of the conversations that are happening that are suggesting Mamdani himself has said certain things, or otherwise twisting the reality.”
Soifer of the JDCA said it was incumbent on Jewish Democrats to also make clear that the attacks on Mamdani’s faith as a Muslim were also intolerable.
“It’s important to note that we’re no strangers to hate, and we see some hate being directed at him as well,” she said.
