Marty Levine
July 1, 2025
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic Mayoral Primary election seemed to many Democratic Party leaders to be a sky-is-falling moment. And for many in the American Jewish community, it was even worse. It was a sign of that dire events were about to befall us as Jews.
Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim American man who identifies politically as a Democratic Socialist. He campaigned on the very issue that catapulted Donald Trump back into the White House and launched these last 6 months of MAGA-frenzy. He ran as someone who understood that for many people, paying bills was the main focus; being able to comfortably afford the basics of life; having a sense that those in power understand the struggles of daily life and were pledging to do something about it.
His platform focused on issues of affordability, the very issue that seemed to underscore both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s different brands of populism. He seemed to be tapping into many voters’ desire to be heard in a way that too many Democratic candidates, up and down the ballot, failed to do. He had radical ideas of providing free bus service (so getting back and forth to work might be more affordable) and free child care (so working parents would not have to meet the exceedingly high cost of child care, robbing them of the benefit of their work.).
Here are some of the “radical ideas” that he campaigned on, as summarized by USA Today:
- freezing rent on rent-stabilized apartments and building more affordable housing…constructing 200,000 new “affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized” units over 10 years.
- eliminate fares on all city buses and…improve their speed by building and expanding priority lanes, bus queue jump signals and dedicated loading zones.
- create the Department of Community Safety…increased investment in mental health programs and crisis response, expanding “evidence-based gun violence prevention programs” and increasing funding to “hate violence prevention programs” by 800%.
- address the cost of food by creating city-owned grocery stores that will pay no rent or property taxes, buy and sell at wholesale prices from centralized warehouses and partner with local vendors to keep prices down.
- offer free childcare for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years.
- implement the distribution of baby baskets to parents of newborns, which would include items like diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, post-partum pads, swaddles, books and local resource guides.
- raise NYC’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030.
- ensuring equal distribution of money and resources to city schools, creating car-free “School Streets,” expanding the Bronx pilot Every Child and Family Is Known program to address homelessness in the school system …renovate 500 public schools with renewable energy infrastructure and HVAC upgrade… build hubs in 50 schools for community emergency situations.
To pay for the cost of these investments, Mamdani campaigned on enacting a “2% tax on residents earning above $1 million annually and raising the corporate tax rate to 11.5%.”
This is a platform that is aggressive. This is a platform that will be challenging to enact. But it is not a platform very different from that championed by Bernie Sanders at a national level or by my own mayor, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, during his mayoral campaign two years ago. Yet this was depicted as too radical, so that Democratic political leaders, from Chuck Schumer, to Hakim Jeffries to other state and local leaders, have gone out of their way to tell Mamdani that he ran a nice campaign, but they were not endorsing him.
What is it about this 33-year-old man whose ability to win decisively just months after there was so much consternation and angst? Why is his emergence just months after President Trump’s electoral victory was capped by the loss of control of both the Senate and the House, not a moment of universal joy in progressive political circles?
Yes, his platform is very left. Yes, his taking on the mantle of “Democratic Socialist” may scare some. Yes, his advocating for taxing the rich may scare some of the party’s base and its funders. Yes, there is room for debate about what might be deemed too idealistic to be practical when it comes to counting votes.
But I think that the worry about Mamdani being too far left is not the real reason he has gotten so much attention and flak from Democratic leaders. I think that the real concern is Mamdani being a Muslim man, and the fear it is said to cause among America’s politically important Jewish community. That’s why Rep Gillen had to suspect him of not being opposed to antisemitism.
That Mamdani supports Palestinian rights and dared to speak against Israel’s actions was the bridge too far. Barak Sella, writing in eJewish Philanthropy, captured how Mamdani threatens the established belief that support of Israel and progressive American politics go hand and in hand.
A democratic socialist who openly supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and challenges Israel’s identity as a Jewish state’s… victory marks a dramatic turning point in the status of Israel within the Democratic Party and exposes a deep erosion in the political power and relevance of American Jewry.
Mamdani didn’t win by stealth. He ran proudly on a platform that includes defunding the police, rent freezes, free daycare and buses, and, crucially, support for Palestinian “resistance.” He legitimized antisemitic slogans like “globalize the intifada,” drawing direct lines between the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and modern Palestinian movements.
After years of American Jewish leaders taking an “Israel is always right and just” attitude despite its policies being labeled by organizations in and out of the land as apartheid, this conclusion is not surprising. If Israel is the beacon of democracy that it has said it is, then anyone who challenges it is suspect.
But Israel’s leaders were not satisfied in just wrapping themselves in the cloak of democracy. They needed more protection as their efforts to eliminate any Palestinian political reality from moving forward. They needed to make their national ambitions an embodiment of Judaism. This was codified in laws passed just years ago, a Jewish state, not a state for all of its inhabitants. The land of Israel belonged to the Jewish people, not to the people of Israel. And that land included a greater Israel, literally from the “river to the sea.”
This identification, this equivalence of Israel and Jew, allowed them increasingly to make speech and action that challenged this premise of antisemitic. One step more is needed to make this defense almost impregnable. Israel and Jewish leaders tell us that only a Jew can define what is antisemitic.
River to the Sea said by an Israeli settler, is not antisemitic. River to the Sea said by Mamdani, is antisemitic. Global Intifada, as understood by someone who is fluent in Arabic as not threatening violence, does not change anything. But if I, as a Jew, say it is an antisemitic statement, it is antisemitic. As one of my beloved fellow congregants told me yesterday as we were debating this issue, you just should not say it if the Jewish Community or just one Jew thinks it is a threatening statement.
This is the trick box of American Jewish politics. It is a box that was constructed by Israel and supported by the Christian nationalist wing of the Republican Party, aka MAGA.
October 7 provided evidence for those intent on demonizing all pro-Palestinian voices and supporting the need for Israel to defend itself. It provided a screen that could block out the days, months, and years before then, stretching back to the beginning of a Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel. It provided a way to wipe away any reason to challenge Israel’s legitimacy or the reality of the mystical 2-State Solution. It provided a way to justify the brutality of Israel’s response and its stated goal, the eviction of 2 million Palestinians from their Gaza home to any place that would allow them in, any place that was not in Israel or the land of the supposed Palestinian state.
And that screen was seized by American Jewish “leaders” speaking as self-proclaimed voices for all American Jews. The protest became anti-Semitic. Advocacy for the Palestinian people became anti-Semitic. Language became anti-Semitic. All because it threatened the mythology of Israel as the font of Justice. All because it undermined support for a state that no longer could hide its intentions and its inhumanity.
For many in the American Jewish community, this strategy has been effective. They cannot hear anything in the aspirations of the Palestinian community for a homeland, but “destroy Israel” and “kill all the Jews”. They may see the killing of thousands of children as bad, but not bad enough to question the legitimacy of those who are perpetrating it. They cannot separate the vision of Israel as a democratic state of all its people from its brutal reality.
American Jewish leaders who see their allegiance to Israel as more important than their commitment to a progressive vision of America, a vision that sees supporting the least advantaged as critical to its safety have also become too comfortable with those who have a different vision, a white Christian vision. They will tolerate voices like these MAGA leaders who seized on Mamdani’s being a Muslim man as a way to attack his progressive identity.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted an AI-generated image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a black burqa.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) tied Mamdani’s victory to what she called America’s “forgetting” of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The New York Mayoral Primary sets the bar for what will come next. Just how committed are we to the America that provided a place for Jewish life to flourish when it requires us to confront an Israel that is no longer the fantasy of liberalism and human rights we wanted it to be? Just how committed to this country’s fulfilling its own vision of “all men and women are created equal” when it requires both personal sacrifice and allyship with those with whom we do not share a commitment to Israel with?
I fear my American Jewish brethren cannot have it both ways. We are being asked in the words of the old union song, “Which Side are We On?”
