The Mamdani Freak-Out
With its hyperfocus on NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and left anti-Zionism, the right-wing Jewish establishment is revealing just how antidemocratic it is.
Dania Rajendra
Roughly two weeks before the New York City mayoral election, more than 1,000 rabbis signed onto an open letter against anti-Zionism in politics, and thus, against Zohran Mamdani, under the misnomer “The Jewish Majority.” They wrote the letter “to declare that we cannot remain silent in the face of rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization throughout our nation.” In doing so, they discredited themselves and expanded Jewish leftists’ opportunity to redefine the political — and spiritual — parameters of Jewish identity.
Anti-Zionism has existed since the beginning of Zionism itself, and has, indeed, grown as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank remains deeply unpopular across the United States and around the world. Democrats’ refusal to contend with this fact — to actually represent their base — has become a symbol of the party’s overall inability to listen to, and fight for, its members.
The letter is a reflection of panic. It revealed the clergy’s diminishing influence and democratic illegitimacy. Even if all their congregants agree with them (unlikely), the majority of New York (and American) Jews do not belong to a synagogue. Their authority as representatives of “the Jewish community” depends, instead, on the specific artificial limits of political discourse they are trying to preserve by asserting that Zionism and Israel “are not political preferences or partisan talking points.”
Their political nature is evident in how the letter polarized what Rebecca Vilkomerson and I earlier called the “confounding middle” — Jews (and others) who abhor Israeli far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and oppose famine as a tool of war but not the war itself. The letter called the question: If democracy also includes anti-Zionism, are you still for it? A majority of a historically large electorate said “yes.” Among them were at least one in three Jewish voters.
While Zohran Mamdani ultimately did not win as many Jewish voters as Andrew Cuomo, the story behind that divide is more complicated than a simple rejection. Cuomo, who ran as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary, benefited from an aggressive campaign by right-wing Jewish organizations that sought to consolidate votes against Mamdani, painting him as an existential threat to the community. Those attacks, rooted in distortions of his criticism of Israel, amplified long-standing fears and suspicions among Jewish New Yorkers. Yet Cuomo’s own campaign — marked by bitterness, fearmongering, overt Islamophobia and the weaponization of antisemitism — alienated many voters, both Jewish and not, who saw through the cynicism.
The campaign flipped institutions and constituencies that previously had supported Cuomo in the primary: big unions, most local Democratic party leaders, and, notably, the New York City Black electorate which showed the biggest swing. (Black-majority precincts went for Cuomo in the primary by 16 points and Mamdani in the general by 26 points.) While Cuomo dominated in neighborhoods with large ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic populations, Mamdani still won by comfortable margins in several Jewish-heavy neighborhoods such as Crown Heights and the Upper West Side.
Despite that support, on the day after the election the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) announced a “Mamdani Monitor” to screen the mayor-elect’s policy and personnel decisions for signs of antisemitism. The initiative includes a new tip line, solely for antisemitic incidents. With this, the ADL plans to create what it calls “transparency around City Hall decisions affecting Jewish New Yorkers.” They have announced no such effort around, for example, the Trump administration.
Countering the politics of division was a central theme of Mamdani’s campaign, which celebrated the cultural differences of supporters while emphasizing the cost-of-living crisis (housing, transit, childcare) that unites them. “We saw that the campaign’s focus on peoples’ material needs and concerns outweighed identity-based issues,” said Fahd Ahmed, executive director of the South Asian organization DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving). “Desi” refers to people with roots in the Indian subcontinent, and DRUM members include Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Christians. “And yet the campaign’s follow-up attention to identity-based issues also solidified their support.”
Anti-Muslim bias has been the norm on both sides of the aisle, but since the 2023 crackdowns on student encampments and President Donald Trump’s subsequent attempts to deport pro-Palestinian activists, Islamophobia has become increasingly inseparable from the rest of Trumpist authoritarianism.
The nakedly racist and intensely parochial nature of the rabbis’ letter connected it to the antidemocratic politics at its core. Many liberal Jews could now see the authoritarianism in our own communities and institutions — pushing American, pro-democracy, self-described “liberal Zionists” into the left-led pro-Mamdani coalition. Among the most notable include American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten and her wife, Sharon Kleinbaum (a rabbi), who spoke at a Mamdani rally during early voting.
The ADL’s tip-line move has only widened the rift, drawing widespread condemnation far beyond the Left, including from the Zionist advocacy organization J Street, which called the effort “alarming.”
“We need our communal institutions to fight hate in all its forms wherever it comes from and not selective fear-inflation aimed at scoring political points or stoking communal panic,” J Street wrote on X. “What the ADL is doing is selective and dangerous,” said Weingarten on X, agreeing with J Street’s critique.
Even conservative TV personality Joe Scarborough pushed back on ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt’s conflation of Mamdani, terrorism and antisemitism. “There’s a lot of blurring and blending here, Jonathan,” said Scarborough on Morning Joe, the show he hosts.
Organizers note that the more the right — from Andrew Cuomo to New York City mayor Eric Adams to unelected Jewish leaders like Greenblatt — lean into the politics of division, the less effective it is. “These racist tactics failed during the primary, and then again on Election Day,” said Jews for Racial and Economic Justice executive director Audrey Sasson, who, like Ahmed, noted the ethnic diversity within JFREJ’s membership and among Jews overall.
“The focus on the shared cost-of-living crisis, and a solid commitment to equal rights everywhere, invited our members into solidarity with one another and our neighbors,” Sasson added. “Campaigning gave us the opportunity to remake how our neighbors know us. Winning gives us the chance to remake how we Jews understand ourselves.”
Dania Rajendra was the founding director of the Athena coalition and has served on the boards of the International Labor Communications Association, Political Research Associates, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. She was also a longtime member of the advisory board of In These Times. She now sits on the international advisory board of the Diaspora Alliance.
