AS I SAID BEFORE, CURTIS SLIWA IS THE RICHT CHOICE FOR MAYOR

‘I’m the only mainstream candidate’ for NYC mayor, Curtis Sliwa says

“Take care of your fellow Jews, because if you don’t, there’s a good chance nobody else will,” the Guardian Angels founder and Republican told JNS. 

 

By Vita Fellig 

 

JNS

Jul 25, 2025 

 

Mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa

 

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for New York City mayor, has no intention of abiding by a proposal, which former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has pushed, that every candidate who isn’t the frontrunner to defeat socialist Zohran Mamdani by September would drop out and support the person with the best chance of beating the state representative.

Jim Walden, an independent candidate for mayor, proposed the plan. Cuomo and New York City Mayor Eric Adams are also running as independents, after Mamdani secured the Democratic nomination.

If Walden, Cuomo and Adams “want to play musical jazz on the Titanic and come down to one, that’s fine by me,” Sliwa told JNS during a recent interview, which ran about an hour. “If I can shoot up just a few more percentage points from what I got in the 2021 mayoral election, which was 27.8% of the vote, then I’m the mayor.”

The founder of the Guardian Angels, with its signature red berets, and a longtime fixture of New York City politics, Sliwa (22%) polled within the margin of error of Mamdani (26%) and Cuomo (23%), while Adams came in at 13% in a HarrisX poll released on July 15, based on responses from 585 registered city voters conducted on July 7-8.

“I’m the only mainstream candidate,” Sliwa told JNS. “Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary fair and square in the primary, and while Eric Adams had a chance to do that, he chose not to.”

A Wick Insights poll released on July 22 found Mamdani (39%) well ahead of Cuomo (21%), Sliwa (18%) and Adams (9%). The poll surveyed 500 likely New York City voters between July 18 and 20.

“The race remains highly competitive,” according to Wick. “Mamdani’s advantage narrows significantly in head-to-head matchups, suggesting that if one of his challengers were to drop out and coalitions were to realign, the outcome could shift.”

“Voter concerns about extreme ideology, experience and the real-world impact of Mamdani’s proposals may also shape the contest in the months ahead,” it added.

Sliwa told JNS that he believes he has a viable path to City Hall this November by connecting with independents, moderate Democrats, and voters who feel left behind on issues such as crime and affordability.

‘Back to the issues’

Mayoral candidates going after Mamdani’s Muslim faith or his identification, on an application to Columbia University, as Asian and African, is the wrong way to go after him, according to Sliwa.

“Too many have attacked his religion and culture, and they made him a victim,” he told JNS. “They made him a martyr.”

As many as 1 million Muslims, most of whom are conservative, can vote in New York City, according to Sliwa.

“Many of them voted for Donald Trump in the national election,” he stated. “But because some Republican influencers and elected congresspeople have attacked their religion and their culture, they’re energized to vote for Mamdani in the general election because they feel it’s tribal.”

Sliwa said it’s important to get back to the issues that are important to average New Yorkers. “That’s how you beat Mamdani,” he said. “Not talking about his religion, his culture and his college application process.”

Mamdani has “no love in his heart for the State of Israel and for Israelis,” according to Sliwa. He noted that many prominent Jews who are running his campaign say that the representative isn’t antisemitic.

“I would say the Jewish community must look internally,” he said. “Why are some of our children and grandchildren following this guy and giving him absolution and exemption when he is using the language of an antisemite?”

“When given the opportunity to bend, to modify his positions,” as “fellow Democratic Socialist of America member” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has “always deftly done, he instead doubles down,” Sliwa said.

 

 

Curtis Sliwa, of the Guardian Angels, participates in the 27th annual New York Chinese Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown, New York City, Feb. 16, 2025.

 

‘Double speak’

On a visit to Israel in 1998, amid the Jewish state’s 50th anniversary celebrations, Sliwa told JNS that bus drivers gave him free rides because they mistook him, with his signature red beret, for a member of the Israeli paratrooper brigade.

Those who chant about the “intifada” and “from the river to the sea,” and who evidently think that “the only place for the Jews, I guess, is Boca Raton in Florida,” misunderstand Israeli geography, according to Sliwa.

“You don’t have to be Jewish to understand that Israel is about the size of New Jersey. If you’ve been there, you can travel across it easily. There’s no room for the Jews in that slogan,” he told JNS. “Do they go to the sixth borough of New York City or to Boca Raton before they’re pushed into the sea? They never explain that part.”

The Palestinian nationalist movement has long changed or obscured the meaning of “intifada,” as Mamdani has done throughout the Democratic primary election, according to Sliwa.

“Yasser Arafat, with a forked tongue, would say to European journalists, ‘Oh, you got it all wrong. Intifada is a spiritual cleansing in our religion,’” he said.

Arafat “then would speak afterwards to the eastern influenced media and talk about violence as a form of liberation,” Sliwa said. “We’ve seen this before—bifurcating the term ‘intifada’ into a kind of double speak, when we know what the intifada really is: calling for the eradication of Jews.”

‘No Messiah’

Adams has failed to address Jew-hatred in New York City properly, according to Sliwa.

“When the antisemites took over Columbia University and made it impossible for Jewish students, faculty or even visitors to walk freely on campus, the mayor could have gone to Columbia,” he told JNS. “Instead, he got on a flight and went to Rome to see the pope, who then blessed him for allowing in migrants to New York City.”

“The Department of Education in New York City, with a $41 billion budget, which is a whole third of the city budget, offers no mandatory classes about antisemitism in the public school system,” Sliwa added. “You must start at a young age, because antisemitism is born in households at the dinner table.”

The Jewish community, through groups like Shomrim and Shmira, has done an effective job of community policing and should continue leaning into that civilian model, especially as Mamdani is running on a platform to defund the New York City Police Department, according to Sliwa.

“We have to convince Jewish organizations, Jewish communities, to continue self-policing,” he said. “There is no Mashiach, no Messiah, who’s going to be the mayor who’s suddenly going to eliminate antisemitism.”

“News for you, I’m a Republican. There are lots of antisemetic Republicans, as we have seen, emerging openly, boldly and brazenly, and there are antisemites on the left,” Sliwa told JNS. “Historically, people will gather up and blame Jews for everything that they perceive to go wrong, so Jews need to self-organize.”

JNS asked Sliwa about city regulations of yeshiva education, which is a significant concern for New York City’s Jewish communities.

Having attended Catholic school, Sliwa told JNS that he values parochial school education. He supports religious freedom in education and thinks that there must be a baseline of secular learning to ensure children acquire essential life skills, he told JNS.

“I’ve been in yeshivas that are exemplary in terms of the children having knowledge outside of their massive religious studies, which they are enrolled in six days a week, morning and night,” he said. “But I’ve also run into yeshivas where the children could not speak English. That should not be the case.”

Educational standards should apply to all private religious schools, with each institution evaluated individually to ensure compliance. But no school should be unfairly targeted for offering a religious education, Sliwa said.

“Rather than making a blanket indictment, because I realize all yeshivas are run differently and I’ve been in enough of them to know, I understand that parents don’t want these outside influences—let’s call them ‘Western influences,’ to affect the religious orientation of their children,” he said.

“Got it, but the basics have to happen,” he told JNS. “Children must be able to function in this world, where English is imperative. Even new immigrants coming in have to learn English; otherwise, they can’t function.”

‘Fear not’

When Sliwa founded the Guardian Angels in 1979, he was directly influenced by Jewish street patrols that he had seen protecting Crown Heights in the late 1960s.

“I actually adopted it from the Maccabees,” he said. “Rabbi Samuel Schrage had men patrolling Crown Heights when gangs came in, knocking people down and attacking them, especially the men,” Sliwa told JNS. “They would yell, ‘Chapsem, chapsem,’” Yiddish for “grab them,” he added.

“I watched as men ran out of houses and businesses, chasing the gangs down Kingston Avenue toward Empire Boulevard,” he said. “These Lubavitchers weren’t trained fighters, but their numbers alone intimidated the gangs, who knew they couldn’t come into that area and terrorize the community.”

Sliwa was also inspired by the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, particularly his insistence on community betterment.

“When other groups, like the Satmar, were constantly under pressure to leave and move to Rockland County outside of the city, the Rebbe always said, ‘Improve, don’t move,’” Sliwa said. “That’s my whole campaign. It was in 2021, and it is now more than ever.”

Having survived an assassination attempt by the Gambino crime family in 1992, Sliwa’s advice to the Jewish community amid rising Jew-hatred is to stay resilient.

“Fear not,” he said. “Take care of your fellow Jews, because if you don’t, there’s a good chance nobody else will.”

“If you become vigilant, if you protect your people under attack, you will get more respect than if you appear incapable of defending yourselves and dependent on government,” he said.