Mamdani’s Success Spotlights a Deepening Rupture Among U.S. Jews

 

Mamdani’s Success Spotlights a Deepening Rupture Among U.S. Jews

 

While Zohran Mamdani won over some Jewish supporters, other Jewish Democrats suggested that concerns about their community’s safety are being dismissed in a movement and a city they helped build.

 

Katie GlueckLisa Lerer

By Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer

June 25, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/us/politics/zohran-mamdani-jewish-voters.html

 

New York’s annual parade celebrating Israel has been a standard stop for the state’s politicians for the last 60 years, drawing in governors, senators and every mayor since Robert F. Wagner to pay their respects to the Jewish community.

 

Now, as Israel’s standing in the United States has fallen precipitously since the Gaza war, New York City Democrats appear likely to nominate a mayoral candidate who does not shy away from his record of anti-Israel activism, underlining an extraordinary departure from past mayors and from current Democratic leadership in Washington.

 

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s success in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world offered the starkest evidence yet that outspoken opposition to Israel and its government — and even questioning its existence as a Jewish state — is increasingly acceptable to broader swaths of the party, even in areas where pro-Israel Jews have long been a bedrock part of the Democratic coalition.

 

Some surveys showed Mr. Mamdani winning as many as one in five Jewish Democrats, with supporters including Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, who also ran for mayor and encouraged his supporters to back Mr. Mamdani through a cross-endorsement. And on Wednesday, Representative Jerrold Nadler, one of the city’s most prominent Jewish leaders, endorsed Mr. Mamdani, saying they would work together “to fight against all bigotry and hate.”

 

But for other Jews around the country who were already struggling with their place in the progressive movement, Mr. Mamdani’s stunning result confirmed their worst fears about the direction of the American left, fueling a sense that urgent concerns about the community’s safety are being dismissed in a movement and a city that Jews helped build.

 

“It’s not that they expect to be run out, or they expect that the N.Y.P.D. won’t be there to protect them,” said Deborah E. Lipstadt, who was the Biden administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. “It’s just another hit in the jaw, that these very deep-seated concerns could have been so easily brushed off by so many people.”

 

The politics of Israel have roiled the Democratic Party for years, accelerated by fierce debates about the war in Gaza, the rise of the far-right Netanyahu government and a running argument about when criticism of Israel veers into antisemitism, the source of much of the anxiety about Mr. Mamdani. Nearly seven in 10 Democrats now express an unfavorable view of Israel, compared with 37 percent of Republicans, according to polling released by Pew Research Center this spring.

 

Those tensions, which President Trump has sought to exploit at every turn, have intensified within the Jewish community, too, especially along generational lines: Younger, more progressive Jews have grown increasingly critical of Israel, and impatient with older generations, whose religious identities have long been tied up with support for the Jewish state.

 

“There’s zero possibility of the Jewish community saying, kind of very clearly, ‘We oppose this candidate,’ when he has supporters from within the Jewish community,” Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, said of Mr. Mamdani. “Whenever you have a phenomenon like this, it’s hard to peel apart the different layers. How much of this is generational, how much is this connected to larger trends around political polarization?”

 

For many New Yorkers, including Jewish ones, their votes were driven by concerns about affordability, or by a desire to stop the comeback of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had resigned in disgrace. Plenty either agreed with Mr. Mamdani’s views on Israel or were willing to look past them, and some recoiled from what they saw as Mr. Cuomo’s efforts to turn antisemitism concerns into a political football.

 

“The results show that most Jews, at least in New York City, at least in my district, agree he’s not antisemitic,” Mr. Nadler said in an interview, saying he had spoken with Mr. Mamdani on Wednesday. He came away from the conversation reassured about where the assemblyman stood, and willing to help him win over Jewish voters, Mr. Nadler said.

 

Mr. Mamdani has said repeatedly that he abhors antisemitism and has said that if he were elected, he would increase funding to combat hate crimes.

 

He alluded to concerns from the Jewish community in his election night speech, noting the “millions of New Yorkers who have strong feelings about what happens overseas.”

 

“While I will not abandon my beliefs or my commitments, grounded in a demand for equality, for humanity, for all those who walk this earth, you have my word to reach further, to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree, and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements,” he told a crowd in Queens early Wednesday morning.

 

Historically, Jewish voters have been an important and, at times, decisive factor in city elections.

 

While identifying Jewish voters is difficult, Jerry Skurnik of Engage Voters U.S., a political consultancy that counts those with distinctive Jewish surnames, put the Jewish electorate in New York at roughly 13 percent of the city’s 4.6 million active registered voters.

 

Support from Hasidic Orthodox Jews, who often vote in a bloc based on rabbinic endorsements, helped Mayor Eric Adams win in 2021.

 

But many Jews in New York City are not observant or strongly tied to Jewish institutions like synagogues, religious schools or social organizations. They are less likely to prioritize Israel as a top consideration in their vote, or even to reflexively support its right to exist as a Jewish state.

 

Many younger New Yorkers from a range of backgrounds found Mr. Mamdani to be a fresh and exciting communicator. As the Muslim son of Indian émigrés who was himself born in Uganda, where his father grew up, he represented an inspiring new New York version of the American dream.

 

Still, questions about his views on Israel and antisemitism loomed large in a city where hate crimes against Jewish people are on the rise. A 2024 report from Thomas P. DiNapoli, the state comptroller, found that anti-Jewish hate crimes had increased 89 percent in New York State from 2018 to 2023.

 

The primary contest unfolded at an especially uneasy time for many American Jews, who despise Mr. Trump and his invoking of antisemitism to attack American universities and round up activists, but are also keenly aware of recent instances in which opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza has manifested in violence against Jews.

 

“Jewish New Yorkers rightfully believe themselves to be at risk, and it’s unthinkable that the city with the largest Jewish population outside of the state of Israel should have so many of its Jewish citizens finding themselves in a vulnerable state of affairs,” said Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, who leads the influential Park Avenue Synagogue and gave an impassioned address about the stakes of the mayor’s race for the Jewish community.

 

New York City, he said in those remarks, has become, “in far too many quarters, inhospitable not only to open expressions of Zionism, but to Judaism itself. And what’s more, this reality could worsen and even receive official sanction.”

 

Prominent Jewish leaders and activists were especially rankled by Mr. Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.” Palestinians and their supporters have called the phrase a rallying cry for liberation, but many Jews consider it a call to violence, a nod to deadly attacks on civilians in Israel by Palestinians in uprisings in the 1980s and 2000s.

 

“The Jewish community has seen time and again how violent rhetoric has transformed into actual violence, so for us it’s just deeply unsettling to have a mayoral candidate who condones and uses that language,” said Rabbi Diana Fersko, senior rabbi at the Village Temple, a Reform congregation in Manhattan, and the author of a book on antisemitism. “My hope is that if Mamdani is elected, he will become more sensitive and more aware of the needs of a significant part of the population that he is going to be leading.”

 

Many elected Democrats, including prominent Jewish leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, oppose the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Mr. Mamdani’s views go beyond disagreeing with Israel’s elected government.

 

He has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide” and, when pressed, has not said if Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, though he has said it has “a right to exist and a responsibility, also, to uphold international law.” He supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, which calls for governments, consumers and investors to cut financial ties with Israel in protest of its treatment of Palestinians, and has dodged questions of whether he would advocate for that policy as mayor.

 

He issued a statement on Oct. 8, 2023 — the day after the Hamas attacks in Israel — condemning Israel and saying that “a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid,” with no mention of Hamas. (He has since condemned the Hamas attacks as a “horrific war crime.”)

 

On private text chains and WhatsApp groups, Jewish voters circulated mock ballots showing Mr. Cuomo ranked first to stop Mr. Mamdani’s rise. Social media influencers with large pro-Israel followings circulated Mr. Mamdani’s past statements about Israel, saying he would threaten Jewish safety in the city.

 

“I feel like last night’s NYC election result is like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK,” posted Jill Kargman, a Jewish writer and actress.

 

After Mr. Mamdani won, dark jokes circulated on some of the same chains about moving out of the city.

 

Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.

 

Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.