(JNS) Last week was a tumultuous one for New York City, its mayor and its Jewish population. Over the course of several days, the city was confronted with events that in any other era might have been considered not only deeply shocking but would have resulted in immediate and serious consequences.
Reporting about the fact that Rama Duwaji, the wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, had liked social-media posts celebrating the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and denying the rape of Israeli women, was followed by the news that the city’s first couple had hosted two well-known terror supporters at their Gracie Mansion official residence. But before the public had a chance to absorb any of that, the mayor and most of his liberal-media cheering section sought to downplay and then confuse the public about the fact that Islamist terrorists, apparently inspired by ISIS, had attempted to bomb an anti-Mamdani demonstration.
Taken as a whole, it painted a dismal picture of how the mayor and his supporters were not only doubling down on support for terrorism against Israelis and Jews, but also seeking to treat domestic Islamist terror as a minor issue. The fact that these events, like so much else about Mamdani, were generally treated as not that big of a deal says volumes about where Americans are as a society. And that, as much as anything else, is something that ought to be sounding alarm bells for Jews and everyone who cares about the consequences of cultural decline, as well as tolerance for antisemitism and violence.
The mayor’s popularity
Mamdani’s ability to shrug off these incidents while being proclaimed by The New York Times as “one of America’s most popular politicians" is an indication not only of how left-wing media and the Democratic Party have his back. Like his election victory in November, it’s also a sign that American society may be at a tipping point when it comes to tolerance for antisemitism. And anyone who thinks that won’t have an impact on Jewish life and the country as a whole hasn’t been paying attention to what has been happening in recent years.
At such a time, it’s essential to remember that when Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City last year, optimists told everyone not to be too upset about it.
It’s true, they conceded, that the 34-year-old was a longtime opponent of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and a supporter of the discriminatory BDS movement. It’s true that he was a founding member of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College in Maine, a campus group that routinely traffics in Jew-hatred. And it’s true that his brief political career was rooted in activism targeting Israel and its Jewish supporters. He’s also backed left-wing economic and cultural doctrines associated with some of the worst horrors of the 20th century and the collapse of liberalism in the 21st.
But as everyone was told, having a mayor with such repugnant views wouldn’t really affect Jewish life in New York, let alone impact what goes on in the rest of the United States or its foreign policy. The mayor would be too busy trying to run the country’s largest city to do any real harm to the Jews or anyone else. In fact, it was predicted, he would soon sink under the weight of the costly and misguided boondoggles that his long-discredited socialist policies would create.
Some of that is true.
The most hysterical predictions on social media of what his arrival at Gracie Mansion would entail were overwrought and inaccurate. New York in 2026 is not Berlin in 1939. Jews are not being rounded up; anything even remotely like that is not possible. Jewish life in all its complexity and vibrancy continues, and there’s no reason to believe that’s about to come to an end. It’s also true that-as has been the case throughout most of its 400 years of existence-New York is, in many ways, both good and bad, a very different place from the rest of America. What happens there doesn’t necessarily impact the nation as a whole.
Still, as the Times asserts and polls confirm, Mamdani is viewed favorably by most New Yorkers. And if his conduct doesn’t change that-and there’s little reason to believe that it will-then that illustrates the shift in public opinion about Jews in the city with the largest demographics outside of Israel.
Spinning terror support
Let’s acknowledge that there is nothing really new concerning the revelations of Duwaji or the couple’s decision to host Mahmoud Khalil, the organizer of the pro-Hamas demonstrations at Columbia University, or Abdullah Akhil, another cheerleader for the genocidal group, at their home for Ramadan. Mamdani has tried (with help from sympathetic left-wing journalists) to spin his opinions about the Middle East as support for the “Palestinian cause."
Their backing for the ideology behind Oct. 7 goes beyond his tolerance for the genocidal chants of “Globalize the intifada" and “From the river to the sea" heard on college campuses. Even a cursory look at his conduct and his statements demonstrates that his views are no different from those of his wife, both of whom cheered for and also denied the victimization of Jewish women and even the kidnapping of children. Whether his media fans admit or not, they are Hamas supporters.
His unwillingness to condemn the social-media posts endorsed by his wife, even as he tried to say her opinions were not necessarily his own, spoke loudly about his stance. And by inviting in those who also cheered for the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, they also demonstrated that in Mamdani’s New York, such sentiments are not only considered within the bounds of acceptable opinion but are actually laudable. He’s now made it clear that the house that mayors of New York have lived in for the past 80 years is a place where such persons are not merely welcome but honored.
Just as with his qualified encouragement of a siege of a Manhattan synagogue last fall, in which he sought to argue that Jewish support for Zionism “violates international law," the new mayor has laid down a marker that has normalized Jew-hatred.
Perhaps even more ominous, however, was the way the mayor and much of the media reacted to the terror attack that took place on March 7 outside of Gracie Mansion.
On that day, two Muslim Americans from Pennsylvania threw bombs (fortunately, they didn’t explode) at demonstrators who had come to protest Mamdani.
Two groups had gathered outside the Upper East Side landmark-one composed of right-wing demonstrators protesting an alleged “Muslim takeover" of New York, and another supporting Mamdani and the influx of Muslim immigrants. In a scene that can only be described as surreal, one of the terrorists came up behind a Mamdani supporter speaking through a bullhorn about the need to welcome everyone to the city and shouted Allahu Akbar" (“God is great"). He then hurled the explosive device with anti-personnel shrapnel over his shoulder. After another failed attempt to explode a device in the midst of the anti-Mamdani group and a brief scuffle with police, the assailant and his accomplice were arrested.
Muslim victimhood narrative
What is key about this incident is the way that most media in New York and nationally, as well as the Mamdani administration, sought to blame the violence on the peaceful demonstrators, who were the terrorists’ intended victims. It’s true that the initial scene was confusing, but for days, leading media outlets and leading left-wing commentators, like CNN’s Ana Navarro and Abby Phillip, have continued to obfuscate the truth about which side the terrorists were on.
The same was true of most New York City politicians, including Mamdani, who, as the Times diplomatically put it, “chose his words carefully" when speaking about what happened in an effort to deflect the blame for the crime on his critics, rather than those who shared his enthusiasm for the “cause" of attacking Jews and other opponents of political Islam.
This was disgraceful in and of itself. But it also showed the commitment of the mayor and much of the liberal media to a narrative of Muslim victimhood in which the real problem is “Islamophobia," rather than the troubling support for Islamist hate and terror. Had the violent culprits been those who had turned out to oppose Mamdani, no one can doubt that the condemnation of their conduct and their ideas from both the mayor and the liberal media would have been unqualified and vehement. Instead, the crime was depicted as mainly the result of the allegedly bad opinions and behavior of the victims.
So successful was this media campaign to spin the incident as an attack on Mamdani that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro actually called him to sympathize and ask if he was alright. Shapiro was the intended victim of a firebombing at his official Harrisburg residence last year during Passover. He has sought to push back against growing tolerance for antisemitism within the Democratic Party that he hopes to lead in 2028 and has criticized Mamdani for his stands. But even he is vulnerable to being influenced by a narrative in which Islamophobia is seen as the real threat, rather than the Jew-hatred and rhetorical support for Islamist violence that Mamdani and others have promoted.
There is a direct connection between this and Mamdani’s attempts to depict the unspeakable orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction of Oct. 7 as primarily the fault of the Jewish victims. The mayor would, no doubt, prefer it if Muslims did not toss bombs, whether they explode or not, in the vicinity of his residence. Still, the effort to portray him as a victim of anti-Muslim intolerance, rather than as someone who gives his official seal of approval to those who applaud such actions when Jews are the victims, isn’t merely outrageous. It essentially normalizes and distorts the debate about anti-Jewish hate.
A dystopian scenario
The main takeaway from this story must be a realization that the dystopian fantasies about the consequences of a Mamdani mayoralty are already starting to come true. Had his opponents in the 2025 election said that if he were elected, Islamist thugs would be tossing bombs aimed at their critics on the streets of New York, they would have been denounced as hysterics trying to foment anti-Muslim hate. Yet that is what has happened, and the response from much of the media has been to do everything they can to twist the discussion about it to one about the awfulness of the mayor’s political opponents.
At the moment, there is little that New York’s Jews or anyone else can do about the mayor, who continues to enjoy the enthusiastic backing of his party and its leading media outlets like the Times. But they can draw conclusions from these incidents and act accordingly.
At the very least, no self-respecting member of the Jewish community or anyone else with claims to a moral compass should accept an invitation from Mamdani as long as he hosts those who cheer for Jew-killers and condones his wife’s pro-Hamas stands.
Jews-or at least those who are willing to be dubbed as “bad Jews" by leftist media because they oppose terrorist murderers either in the Middle East or the United States-should not serve in a Mamdani administration.
And it should also be said that his political opponents, like President Donald Trump, should stop cozying up to Mamdani or treating him as if he were a normal politician on the other side of the aisle with whom one can agree to disagree.
The normalization of Mamdani’s conduct may be inevitable in a political culture where antisemitism has become fashionable orthodoxy on the political left. The costs of that attitude will become increasingly apparent in a city and a national culture where tolerance of hate for Jews is regarded as either nothing out of the ordinary or an acceptable opinion.
A city where people like Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji are not held accountable for supporting the atrocities of Oct. 7 and Jew-hatred in general is one in which, sooner or later, Islamist violence will not only occur but be tolerated, rationalized and excused in the same manner as Hamas’s crimes.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.