Wrapped in the gloss of a palpable false messianism, Zohran Mamdani's rise to being elected mayor of New York is an unsustainable political model that is bound to fall and fail based on its own disingenuous notions. While extreme Socialism, or "Communism light", is classed as a so-called "messianic" political ideology, it is big on hype and very low on what it can accomplish in reality. Socialist and Communist "messiah"-figures have long paved the way to political and everyday hell.
Mamdani's message of "a loaf on every table and a chicken in every pot" resonated with the hungry underclasses living in New York City: Poorer Blacks, Hispanics, Arabs, Asians and all sorts of hungry and desperate residents and refugees are the working class proletariat that Chairman Mamdani is now leading to storm the barricades and Bastilles of the diminishing Middle Class and the Upper Classes in their New York ivory towers.
Chairman Mamdani's promise of a cornucopia of fun and games in the form of 'free lunches" for the hungry worked successfully on a very primal level that was impossible for the Establishment's dull and discredited Cuomo to fight off.
For example, the poor use public transportation so it's a no-brainer for Chairman Mamdani to offer them free busing. Anyone who has been using the New York City Transit System's buses in recent years has seen for themselves how crowds of non-paying passengers rush the back doors and squeeze on for free bus rides anyway while no one is there to stop them. May as well make it official.
Once upon a time there used to be a Transit Police patrolling the subways keeping crime out, and fare beaters were non-existent. Now crime can happen at any time any place and fare beating is a sport practiced by even the most respectable passengers as automatic exit doors swing open. Presumably Mamdani could count on the fare-beater voters!
Major supermarkets and pharmacies have given up on keeping their goods behind locked display cabinets due to brazen day-light theft in poorer neighborhoods. They simply pulled out en masse from many highly populated poorer neighborhoods. Now Chairman Mamdani, playing the role of a Muslim Santa Claus, plans on opening city-run supermarkets to distribute free or near- free groceries relying on city taxes taken from the city budget. Not to mention many other freebies this latter day Mother Theresa in Islamic garb will dole out while soaking rich New Yorkers with more taxes. Or so he thinks.
It is not just the poor "starving" masses that voted for Mamdani. He won in Manhattan, Queens, The Bronx and Brooklyn and lost only in Staten Island which is a Republican die-hard holdout. The rich and swanky Leftist Liberals all over New York swooned over Mamdani, ignoring his antisemitic rhetoric and anti-Israel vitriol. This has brought the well known self-hating Jews to sink to a new low. They joined the so-called "new voters" of twenty and thirty somethings college-educated by Marxist Socialist professors and teachers who imagine they are voting their way into some sort of Socialist "heaven." Instead they are paving the proverbial road to hell and not even with good intentions.
The swanky legacy media could not get enough of the telegenic super star Mamdani who has never run a business or anything else for that matter, but will now head a city with a budget of tens of billions of dollars. Reports are coming out of how Muslim and Arab anti-Israel organizations and powers funded a lot of Mamdani's campaign and that is on top of his mother's fame as a noted Bollywood movie-maker.
Mamdani is already lining up big name antisemites and Israel haters for top positions in his administration. It remains to be seen how his early on calls to defund the New York City Police Department and replace police with social workers will play out. After all, if as he says he plans on arresting Netanyahu, he will need at least a few keystone cops to do that.
What is most noticeable is that Mamdani is not just a smooth talker and manipulator, but that he also has a hugely inflated ego. He smiles with the confidence of someone who thinks he can climb any mountain and conquer the world, and who has God, uhm Allah, on his side..
Bottom line, jokes aside, we are entering a very dark time in the history of New York City for which there is no precedent.
Rabbi Yitschak Rudominwas born to Holocaust survivor parents in Israel, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College-Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach - Kiruv Rechokim. He was the Director of the Belzer Chasidim's Sinai Heritage Center of Manhattan 1988-1995, a Trustee of AJOP 1994-1997 and founder of American Friends of South African Jewish Education 1995-2015. From 2017-2024 he was a docent and tour guide at The Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Downtown Manhattan, New York.
He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at izakrudomin@gmail.com