MAMDANI'S RECORD ON ISRAEL-HATRED

The halcyon days of Jewish New York City are over

The city's newly elected Democratic Socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, supports the BDS movement and is likely to push an anti-Israel agenda

 

By Sarah N. Stern 

 

JNS

Nov 14, 2025

 

 

 

 

The post-World War II halcyon days for the American Jewish community in the United States have ended. New York City, which has more Jews within its population than any place on earth outside of Israel, elected its first jihadist mayor.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim. It has everything to do with the very words that have come out of his mouth. Two years ago, Mamdani said, “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it has been laced by the IDF,” a reference to the Israel Defense Forces. He has also passionately stated (that is, until he camouflaged his ideas while running for mayor), “to globalize the intifada.”

Now, as the polished, pre-eminent politician that he is, when asked about these statements, he conveniently smiles and adroitly changes the subject to rent control, free childcare and free buses. Mamdani supports the BDS movement and has gone so far as to call Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide.”

On Oct. 8, 2023, the day after the barbaric Hamas genocide of 1,200 innocent people in southern Israel, Mamdani stated: “A just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”

The sadistic atrocities committed by Hamas were not once mentioned.

And Israeli apartheid? Walk into any hospital, and you will see Israeli-Arab doctors, patients, nurses and orderlies. According to a 2023 survey, at least 25% of all doctors in Israel are Israeli Arabs, along with 49% of all pharmacists. Khaled Kabub is the first Arab Muslim member of the Israeli Supreme Court; as such, he holds the power to indict any member of the Israeli Knesset, including the prime minister of Israel.  

Yet Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America friends conveniently ignore these facts and push an anti-Israel agenda that, according to leaked documents, includes:

• Divesting city pensions from Israeli bonds and securities;
• Banning Israeli products from the city-run grocery stores that Mamdani wants to open;
• Investigating real estate agents allegedly “hosting illegal sales of stolen lands in the West Bank”;
• Stripping tax-exempt nonprofit status from entities that raise funds for the Israel Defense Forces;
• Ending the New York City Police Department’s training with the “Israeli Occupation Forces”;
• Arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and active IDF soldiers for “war crimes” if they enter New York City;
• Dismantle the NYC-Israel Economic Council formed by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams.

Given his history, Mamdani will likely push some, if not all, of these items once he’s sworn in as mayor of New York City. Consider that Mamdani founded the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he unsuccessfully lobbied for BDS. Immediately after its failure, he severed all ties with the J Street colleague who assisted him.

In 2014, he wrote in The Bowdoin Orient, “Israeli universities are both actively and passively complicit in the crimes of both the Israeli military and the Israeli government in all its settler-colonial forms.”

On his podcast, “Talking Palestine,” in 2020, Mamdani said: “If you were to look at the lens of BDS and how it applies here in New York City, you would say that Cornell-Technion is something you would be talking about.”

He is now talking about shutting down Cornell Tech’s joint research educational program between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, housed on the city’s Roosevelt Island.

Mamdani’s cultivated “coolness” and chic affectations have gotten him to where he is today. There is a pretension calibrated to cultivate the image of the most liberal, open-minded, “woke” politicians who deal in empty aphorisms and vacuous phrases. It is all calculated to appeal to the millennial liberal and the identity of Muslims, who feel “under-represented.”

Should American Jews who care passionately about the survival of Israel—the sole Jewish nation in the world, out of 195—be worried?

The answer is, unfortunately, a resounding yes.