22/10/2025, 19:26 Opinion | Why Mamdani Frightens Jews Like Me - The New York Times
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BRET STEPHENS
Why Mamdani Frightens Jews Like Me
Oct. 21, 2025
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By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
A recent Fox News poll found that 38 percent of Jewish New Yorkers intend to vote for
Zohran Mamdani for mayor, setting aside whatever reservations they might have about
the candidate’s views on Israel. At least a few of those voters will support the 34-year-old
state assemblyman not despite those views, but because of them.
That’s their right as Americans and as Jews. But I feel sure that for almost any Jew
among the 42 percent who plan to vote for Andrew Cuomo, the former New York
governor, or the 13 percent who support Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate,
Mamdani’s views are more than disturbing.
Readers of this column, particularly those inclined to vote for Mamdani, should at least
pause to consider the reasons.
A good place to start is to concede that nothing in the public record suggests Mamdani is
antisemitic — taking the narrowest view of what the word implies. He has spoken of the
“crisis of antisemitism” in New York as “something that we have to tackle.” He has
condemned the hate crimes this year in Washington and in Boulder, Colo. And he’s
reached out to Jewish communities of various stripes, promising that Zionists would be
welcome in his administration.
But Mamdani is also a longtime anti-Zionist of a peculiarly obsessed sort. Three lesser-
known points of his biography stand out.
First, as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, where he helped found the campus
chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the student
arm of the left-wing Jewish group J Street, which supports Palestinian statehood, opposes
Israeli settlements, and is roundly critical of the Israeli government.
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22/10/2025, 19:26 Opinion | Why Mamdani Frightens Jews Like Me - The New York Times
Why? Because J Street supports Israel as “a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.”
This was too much for Mamdani and his comrades in S.J.P., for whom working with J
Street was a form of normalization. Mamdani, who to this day does not support Israel’s
right to exist as a Jewish state, also called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
Bowdoin’s president rightly dismissed that notion for “stifling discussion and the free
exchange of ideas.”
The second was a rap song Mamdani wrote in 2017, called “Salaam.” “My love to the Holy
Land Five, you better look ’em up,” he crooned.
His critics did: The Holy Land Foundation was an ostensible charity convicted in 2008 of
funneling $12 million to Hamas; the five defendants in the case received prison sentences
of 15 to 65 years for crimes including money laundering, tax fraud and support of
terrorism.
Finally, a few months before the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, Mamdani introduced a bill in
the State Assembly that could have jeopardized the tax-exempt status of virtually every
pro-Israel charity. The bill, noted Alex Bores, a fellow assemblyman and a Democrat, “is
not aimed at improving regulations of nonprofits broadly, or even applying standards
which would apply across the board.” Rather, it “singularly applies to organizations
providing aid to a specific country and its people. This is immediately suspicious.”
What stands out about this list is the affinity for extremists, the double standards, and the
monomania. Especially the monomania.
One of the ways anti-Zionists tend to give themselves away as something darker is that
the only human-rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s; the only state among
dozens of religious states whose legitimacy they challenge is Israel; the only group
whose suffering they are prepared to turn into their personal crusade is that of the
Palestinians. What gives? Has Mamdani sponsored bills to oppose, say, the persecution of
Uyghurs in China or Kurds in Turkey or gays in his native Uganda, where he was
photographed in July with a notoriously homophobic official? Did he ever rap his “love”
for the people of Iran fighting their regime?
This is not the only thing that scares so many Jewish voters. An article of faith among
many self-professed anti-Zionists is that they are not antisemitic. But Jews don’t live in a
world of fine-grained semantic distinctions. The man accused of killing Yaron Lischinsky
and Sarah Milgrim, the young couple fatally shot in May outside the Capital Jewish
Museum in Washington, yelled “Free Palestine.” Many of the thousands of antisemitic
incidents nationwide since the Oct. 7 attacks also have had at least a patina of anti-
Zionism. The homes and businesses of prominent Jews have been attacked or vandalized,
some by pro-Palestinian protesters, adding to the sense of threat.
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22/10/2025, 19:26 Opinion | Why Mamdani Frightens Jews Like Me - The New York Times
What does it mean for Jewish New Yorkers that a mayoral candidate who pledges to fight
antisemitism also proudly avows the very ideology that is the source of so much of the
hatred Jews now face? Why, right after Oct. 7, could he do no better than to issue a mealy-
mouthed acknowledgment that Jews had died the day before? Why couldn’t he even
denounce the perpetrators of the most murderous antisemitic rampage in the past 80
years?
Even that’s not the deepest worry. “The painful truth,” Elliot Cosgrove, the rabbi of Park
Avenue Synagogue, observed in his Saturday sermon, is that “Mamdani’s anti-Zionist
rhetoric not only appeals to his base but seems to come with no downside breakage. What
business does an American mayoral candidate have weighing in on foreign policy unless
it scores points at the ballot box? I don’t doubt that Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is heartfelt
and sincere, but its instrumentalization as an election talking point should frighten you in
that it says more about the sensibilities of our fellow New Yorkers than it does about
Mamdani himself.”
In the long, sorry tale of anti-Jewish politics, it hasn’t just been the prejudice of a few
that’s led Jews to grief. It’s been the supine indifference of the many. That’s what
frightens Jews like me.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural
issues. Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Mamdani Frightens
Jews Like Me
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