Jonathan S. Tobin
Jews for Mamdani are blind and shameful. Jewish leaders who won’t take a stand about an antisemite becoming mayor of New York City may be worse.
Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman and the Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City, speaks during a press conference in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, N.Y., on Oct. 29, 2025. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.
The latest poll about the race for mayor of New York City revealed something that everybody already knew. According to the survey published by Quinnipiac University this week, a not insignificant percentage of Jewish respondents—16%—say they are voting for Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani.
Given the state assemblyman’s record of support for the openly antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine and Council on American Islamic Relations, his refusal to condemn calls for genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews (“Globalize the intifada”), coupled with his invocation of traditional tropes of Jew-hatred in which Israel is depicted as the source of the world’s problems, it is shocking that any Jews at all would be in favor of such a person becoming the mayor of the largest Jewish city in the world outside of the State of Israel.
Who is voting for Mamdani?
Yet anyone who is surprised that one out of six New York Jews will likely vote for Mamdani hasn’t been paying attention to what has been happening not only in the Jewish community but in the United States as a whole. This result demonstrates how much of the American Jewish left has abandoned Israel. But it also shows how toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism have caused some people to identify with those who have been supporting Palestinians who murder Jews.
Yet as the campaign goes into its final days, the most troubling aspect of the increasingly bitter debate about Mamdani does not concern the candidate’s open Jewish backers. Rather, it is the fact that so many Jewish leaders, including rabbis, have chosen silence or neutrality on a race with potential life-and-death consequences for the community. At a time of genuine crisis, a great many of those tasked with guiding their fellow Jews are hiding behind their pulpits rather than using them to help mobilize people to avert a potential catastrophe.
Under the circumstances, the failure to stand up against antisemitism may actually be far worse than the stances of those who are making no secret about taking sides with Mamdani.
The Quinnipiac poll show that Mamdani, the Democratic Party candidate, still holds a double-digit lead over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an Independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels. It did show that his advantage has been cut down to 10 points after leading by far bigger margins since he won his party’s June primary, with Mamdani getting 43%, Cuomo 33% and Sliwa 14%. That’s encouraging those clinging to hope that Cuomo can come from behind and pull out a victory, even though Sliwa stubbornly refuses to get out of the race, a move most observers have long believed is necessary for those opposed to Mamdani to prevail.
A deeper dive into the numbers, which reveals the religious affiliations of those responding, gives a clear insight into where the candidates are getting support and who constitutes the current electorate of the nation’s largest city. Cuomo leads among Protestants, Catholics and Jews. But he is still trailing by a significant margin because 50% of those who define themselves as “other” when it comes to faith are for Mamdani. This, along with the even more significant fact that he is leading among those under 50, is one of the main reasons why Mamdani remains the overwhelming favorite to win.
Do Muslims outnumber Jews?
If accurate, these results raise questions about whether the growth of the Muslim population has been underestimated. Most demographers have claimed that Muslims constitute anywhere from 8% to 10% of the total of city residents, while Jews make up about 12%. It will be interesting to see if, as some have speculated, we are approaching the point where the growth of the Muslim and Arab community, combined with the decline in the number of Jews (other than among the Orthodox), is contributing to a change in the balance of political power in New York.
As for the Jewish vote, according to Quinnipiac, Cuomo has an overwhelming lead with 60% while Mamdani gets 16%, Sliwa 12% and another 12% either voting for a minor candidate or undecided.
On the one hand, that gives the lie to those among leftist Jewish groups like J Street, as well as openly anti-Zionist and antisemitic organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, that the majority of Jews are now against Israel.
Cuomo is despised by many due to his well-deserved reputation for political thuggery during his time as governor and even long before that, as well as for his dictatorial and disastrous policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Not to mention the fact that he was driven from office during his third gubernatorial term over accusations of sexual harassment and bullying.
Still, Cuomo has a long record of solid support for Israel and remains the most viable of the alternatives to Mamdani in large measure because he is clearly opposed to his Marxist policies, as well as his antisemitism.
The likelihood of Mamdani winning the mayoralty has set off a fierce debate among Jews, especially among rabbis.
More than 1,100 rabbis around the nation have signed a letter opposing Mamdani titled “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future.” The document quoted Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Reform movement’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s statement that “when public figures like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide, they ‘delegitimize the Jewish community, and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews.’”
It also quoted Conservative Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove’s speech from the pulpit of the Park Avenue Synagogue, when he said, “Zionism, Israel, Jewish self-determination—these are not political preferences or partisan talking points. They are constituent building blocks and inseparable strands of my Jewish identity. To accept me as a Jew but to ask me to check my concern for the people and State of Israel at the door is a nonsensical proposition and an offensive one, no different than asking me to reject God, Torah, mitzvot or any other pillar of my faith.”
The letter called upon Jews to unite against Mamdani.
Solidarity with antisemitism
It was answered by a competing rabbinic letter that said Mamdani’s “Support for Palestinian self-determination stems not from hate, but from his deep moral convictions.” That is utterly disingenuous since Mamdani has made it clear that he supports the elimination of the one Jewish state on the planet, rather than merely advocating for a Palestinian one beside it. The letter also went on to equate the mythical threat of Islamophobia with the documented surge of Jew-hatred in the United States since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attack on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023.
Another letter from Jewish Voice for Peace reiterated Mamdani’s blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” and claiming the Jewish majority that supports Israel is trying to suppress anti-Zionist voices. It also claimed that “Palestinian and Jewish liberation are interconnected.” But since the majority of Palestinians have—as the most recent poll of those living in Gaza as well as Judea and Samaria made clear—shown that they still support Hamas’s goals for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its people, that is a rather bizarre idea about what would constitute “Jewish liberation.”
Those two letters opposing the call to mobilize against Mamdani make it obvious that some Jews who will vote for him are either ignorant about what he and others in the “pro-Palestinian” camp believe or actually share his hateful opposition to Jewish rights and survival.
That was certainly the case with a much-publicized effort to promote a “Jews for Zohran” campaign led by a group of four hard-left female rabbis. One of them, Abby Stein, is a trans person and a vitriolic advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza in order to let Hamas survive the conflict. She also provided Jewish cover to an event sponsored by the Islamist regime in Iran. But she is best known for getting herself thrown out of the White House’s “Pride Month” celebration lsat year for disrupting former first lady Jill Biden’s speech because she thought that the administration was too supportive of Israel.
Some of this is the result of the shift in American culture in which toxic leftist ideologies have branded Israel and Jews as “white” oppressors of “people of color” as part of a distorted vision of the conflict in the Middle East as a rerun of the struggle for civil rights during America’s past. In this way, some Jewish liberals have come to accept the false characterization of Zionism—the Jewish national liberation movement—as somehow being racist while seeing nothing wrong with Palestinian nationalism, even though it is inextricably tied to intolerance for the presence of Jews in the country where they are indigenous.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, when Jewish celebrities like actor Mandy Patinkin, who also supports “Palestinian liberation,” have spread blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” and opposed the post-Oct. 7 war against Hamas would endorse Mamdani.
It’s equally true that some young Jews have been seduced by Mamdani’s socialism—something that also reflects their ignorance about the way Marxism has failed every time it has been tried and the way it empowers tyrannical minorities. As author Batya Ungar-Sargon put it: “Zohran Mamdani, the Pied Piper of Bushwick, offers trust-fund socialism to over-credentialed, downwardly mobile 20-30-somethings who can’t become adults due to the job/housing markets. A nepo baby, he legitimizes living off your parents in a rent-stabilized apartment into your 30s.”
All of these pro-Mamdani Jews are under the mistaken impression that a city run by someone hostile to Jewish life in Israel wouldn’t impact their existence. They’re wrong about that. New York has experienced a steady decline over the past decade due to the blunders of leftist former Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the incompetence and corruption of incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (who dropped out of the race and endorsed Cuomo when it was clear his independent run would fail). But putting City Hall in the hands of a Democratic Socialist would marginalize Jewish security, especially when you consider Mamdani’s support for the pro-Hamas mobs that targeted Jews on the city’s college campuses.
As discouraging as the blindness or malevolence of those who will vote for Mamdani may be, what is truly alarming is the apathy of leaders who prefer to be silent about this threat at a moment of genuine crisis for the Jewish community. While some may deplore the arguments between rabbis opposed to and in favor of Mamdani, the real puzzle concerns the large numbers of Jewish leaders, both rabbis and communal leaders, who are simply standing on the sidelines and doing nothing to avert an impending disaster.
In strong contrast to the leadership exhibited by Hirsch and Cosgrove, both of whom have been critical of Israel’s government but rightly understand what the mainstreaming of Mamdani’s antisemitism will mean, are those like Reform’s Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, who told her congregation that she would honor the political “pluralism” of her congregation by not taking a public stand on the election.
Some might defend this stance in keeping with the tradition of religious leaders avoiding partisanship. But with the Trump administration gutting the Johnson Amendment, which threatened to strip religious institutions of their nonprofit status, that excuse is gone. Moreover, we all know that many religious leaders and congregations, especially those in the African-American community, have long been active participants in electoral politics.
It’s true that virtually all synagogues, even in deep-blue New York City, have congregants that sit on both sides of the political aisle, and that avoiding endorsements or condemnations of candidates can be safer than taking a stand on them.
But this is no ordinary election for New York Jews.
Disgraceful neutrality
So, while the support for Mamdani from those Jews who are his ideological bedmates is tragically wrongheaded and dangerous, I can at least understand it.
What is hard to comprehend is how anyone, even those like Buchdahl, who have been harshly critical of Israel while still supporting its existence, can think the election of an openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist mayor is something Jews must agree to disagree about.
To stand aside and proclaim neutrality while a man who believes that Israel is at the center of a conspiracy to destroy the world—a standard trope of antisemitism, whether you’re on the right or the left—is not merely indefensible. It is a contradiction of every notion of Jewish ethics, in addition to the obligation for all Jews to be responsible for one another’s well-being and safety. And when sent out from a bastion of Manhattan elites, it’s a signal to the rest of New York Jewry and the people of Israel that they are on their own. And that, perhaps even more than the stands of those deluded Jews who share Mamdani’s ideological obsessions or don’t realize how dangerous his victory would be for their community, is truly disgraceful.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
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