New York holds its breath
Appallingly, progressive Jews are supporting an unhinged Jew-hater because they define this stance as conscience.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Oct 30, 2025
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., react on stage during a "New York is Not for Sale" rally at Forest Hills Stadium in the Queens borough of New York City on Oct. 26, 2025.
With the Islamist Zohran Mamdani poised to be elected mayor of New York City next week, many have been scratching their heads over how any Jew could be voting for him.
Mamdani is an Islamic terrorism sympathizer. He supports a boycott of Israel and doesn’t believe that the Jewish state should exist. He sees nothing wrong in chants of “globalize the intifada.”
He also subscribes to the “Twelver” Shia Muslim sect, the creed of Iran’s genocidal Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that proclaims an apocalypse will bring the Shia messiah to earth.
Mamdani sheds tears not for the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11 but for his “aunt”—who, when it was revealed she wasn’t his aunt at all, suddenly turned into another relative altogether—who, in his view, was the real victim of that Islamist atrocity because she was too frightened afterwards to wear her hijab.
Recent revelations suggest he is driven by an unhinged obsession with hating Jews. It emerged this week that in September 2023, he had said: “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
Asked this week if he stood by that comment, he dodged the question. If there had been any doubt that he’s an out-and-out antisemite, that remark alone should have nailed it. The belief that the Jews are behind problems that have nothing at all to do with them is a core trope of classical antisemitism.
There are signs that more people are beginning to wake up to Mamdani’s extremism. His polling numbers have recently started to slide. The latest Quinnipiac poll—of admittedly a very small sample of 170 Jews—suggests that 60% of them will vote for Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, and only 16% will vote for Mamdani.
Yet four self-described rabbis—three female and one trans—were filmed in a promotional ad for Mamdani on a street in Manhattan cooing that he wanted to make the city affordable and safe. “We know fellow Jews want to be able to afford housing, transportation and childcare,” simpered one. There was no acknowledgment that fellow Jews might be appalled at his anti-Israel and anti-Jewish obsession and might even be put at risk by his victory.
The actor and limousine liberal Mandy Patinkin and his wife, actress, writer and producer Kathryn Grody, have produced an election video in which Patinkin gushes, with his arm round Mamdani’s shoulder: “We are going to win this because we have this extraordinary human being who is going to lead our city—and if we’re really thinking, our nation and the world—to a better, safer all-inclusive existence.”
Mamdani laughed along with this jovial hyperbole. Of course, as an Islamist, he is indeed committed to conquering the world—for Islam.
This is a man whose mother, in a newly surfaced interview, said he thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian, and is “not an American at all.” This is a man who, dressed in Islamic garb at a street demonstration filmed three months before the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was screaming like a rabble-rouser that U.S.-based charities helping people in Israel should be stripped of their tax-exempt status.
More than 1,100 rabbis from around America have now signed an open letter voicing concern that, if elected, Mamdani would threaten “the safety and dignity of Jews in every city.”
Yet a coalition of left-wing, anti-Israel Jewish New Yorkers released its own letter accusing Israel of “genocide and apartheid,” and rejecting attempts to silence the “progressive and anti-Zionist voices among us.”
More than 880 other “rabbis” signed a third letter claiming that Mamdani’s support for Palestinian self-determination “stems not from hate, but from his deep moral convictions.”
Appallingly, “progressive” Jews are supporting an antisemite obsessed with hating Jews and Israel because this stance has been defined as progressive conscience. Worse still are the Jews who themselves demonize Israel with lies and who claim that by doing so, they are upholding Jewish values.
An important new book analyses this tragic phenomenon. Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist who previously wrote The Oslo Syndrome, in which he pondered the self-destructive Israeli appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs. Now in The Canary on the Couch, he turns his attention to “the psychology of Jewish self-delusions in the face of rising antisemitism.”
Diaspora Jews have long feared that the idea of Jewish nationhood risks undermining their civil rights as American or British citizens. In the United States, many Jews subscribe to left-wing ideologies that have venomously turned against Israel. As a result, these Jews have also turned against the Jewish state.
Stung by the charge that Jews are only concerned with parochial Jewish interests, they’ve been anxious to demonstrate their commitment to causes outside the Jewish community, even where these run counter to Jewish interests, like the anti-Jew, anti-white and anti-West Black Lives Matter movement.
The fear that the wider community might turn against Jews has meant that—even now that it has indeed done so at an unprecedented level—these cowed Jews don’t blame the haters, but instead blame Israel for allegedly turning the community against them. As Levin states, even some Jews genuinely concerned with Israel’s well-being are thus sickeningly blaming Jewish victimization on other Jews.
For similar reasons, there’s a fixed belief among Jewish leaders that the principal threat to diaspora Jews comes from the extreme right, despite the fact that most of this threat emanates from the progressive radicals of race, gender and climate politics.
This helps explain why there has been no concerted opposition to Mamdani from America’s Jewish community leadership. Many of these leaders believe not that people like Mamdani have incited the current explosion of antisemitism but that Israel has tarred their own standing in society, particularly among the intelligentsia, media and other cultural icons with whom they identify.
Levin calls out a range of U.S. communal bodies and leaders, including the Anti-Defamation League, the New Israel Fund, J Street and Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the leader of Reform Judaism, for effectively siding with the mortal enemies of Israel and the Jewish people or failing to do enough to counter them.
Rather than call out the demagogic black community leader Al Sharpton, who has spewed anti-Jewish invective and has been involved in anti-Jewish violence that goes back to the Crown Heights riots in 1991 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Levin notes that Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, effectively embraced him as an ally against the right.
Along with the campus-based Hillel organization, says Levin, the ADL has also failed to take adequate action to counter the threats to Jewish students on campus, and no other legacy Jewish organization has stepped up to fill this void.
And none of them has called out the rampant antisemitism that is standard fare throughout the Muslim world. Instead, these organizations parrot the leftist denunciation of anyone critical of Muslims as a bigot.
There’s another reason that Jewish community leaders don’t call out these enemies within. The Jewish world tells itself that the greatest threat it faces is disunity, which has brought disaster upon the Jewish people in the past because it has fatally weakened its defense against its enemies.
While it is undeniable that disunity is disastrous, an even greater catastrophe is surely threatened by Jews turning against their own. This provides both lethal weaponry and a protective shield for the mortal enemies of the Jewish people.
These anti-Jewish Jews have, in effect, joined forces with those who are intent upon the extermination of the Jewish state. They sanitize and incentivize these enemies while gaslighting Jews who support Israel and whom they demonize as nationalist bigots.
The damage that’s been done by Jews who have a pathological impulse to damage their own people, and who hurl against Israel and Zionism the same malevolent lies deployed by those who want Israel and the Jews removed from the world, is unconscionable.
The willful refusal by the Jewish community leadership to address this amounts to a betrayal of a Jewish community that’s under siege. If Mamdani is elected, they will have much more to answer for.
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