Members of the city’s more conservative Jewish communities are incredulous.
Are Jewish New Yorkers really prepared to vote for a candidate like Zohran Mamdani?
Recent polling and friendly mainstream media coverage suggest that a significant proportion of the city’s Jews are willing to pull the lever for a candidate who has been openly hostile to Israel for the entirety of his short political career and who has made that hostility a central component of his campaign for mayor of New York City.
A supporter of the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement, Mamdani has endorsed divesting New York pension funds from Israel. He has branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and pledged to order the New York Police Department to arrest him if he visits the city. And on the two-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks, he chose to excoriate the Israeli government for using the atrocity to launch a “genocidal war” and perpetuate an “apartheid” — accusations that he repeated during a recent debate with Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa.
Judging by the numbers, Mamdani’s rhetoric has not deterred large numbers of Jewish voters from supporting him: Recent polls from Marist and Fox News each had 32 percent of Jewish likely voters backing Mamdani, with 55 percent in each poll getting behind Cuomo. Major media outlets have emphasized his allegedly strong Jewish support. In August, a New York Times headline proclaimed that “many Jewish voters back Mamdani. And many agree with him on Gaza.”
But are so many Jewish New Yorkers truly eager to vote for a candidate who has spent years decrying the world’s sole Jewish state, or is there far greater suspicion of Mamdani within the Jewish community than the polling and friendly media coverage suggest?
“To me, it seems ridiculous,” one member of the Crown Heights Hasidic community told National Review. “I just don’t think that those types of numbers are possible. . . . [It would not] surprise me if somebody is saying one thing on the phone or something that doesn’t reflect their actual beliefs.”
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt — a journalist, rebbetzin, and longtime New York resident — is similarly unconvinced. “In our community. . .there’s a lot of political diversity. But on this one issue, there is no diversity,” she said. Jewish New Yorkers are “concerned across the board about Mamdani. . . . I think that these stories ignore large swaths of the American Jewish community that, frankly, most liberal publications don’t have access to. They don’t have access to the Orthodox community, the conversations going on internally, nor the Russian-speaking community, nor the Mizrahi community.”
Brooklyn resident and educational consultant Liza Libes told National Review that New York’s more liberal Jews are likely overrepresented in such poll results. “The reason they tend to be more liberal is they’ve kind of been living in America for four or five generations,” she said. “They’ve never been really faced with the threat of their Jewish identity kind of working against them. They’re very integrated into society. They’ve never had this experience of being othered as Jewish people. So therefore, they feel that antisemitism is not a big problem because their personal families have not really experienced any of that.”
In neighborhoods with large concentrations of Orthodox and Hasidic voters — such as Borough Park, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights — Andrew Cuomo received significantly more votes than Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary.
But at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cuomo targeted many of these areas with draconian restrictions. He closed schools and yeshivas, limited the size of religious gatherings, and threatened to close synagogues if his orders were not obeyed. In April 2020, an outdoor funeral for a rabbi was broken up by police; weeks later, thousands were allowed to march unimpeded through the five boroughs to protest the killing of George Floyd. One member of the Chabad-Lubavitch community told National Review that despite their concerns about Mamdani, many potential voters in such ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods are also unwilling to vote for Cuomo because of his actions during the pandemic. And this loss of support has hindered Cuomo’s campaign.
All of the New Yorkers who spoke to National Review expressed serious concerns about what a Mamdani victory could mean for the prevalence of antisemitism within the city.
“We’re seeing somebody for the first time, I think, who, if nothing changes, is going to be the next mayor, and in my opinion — and I think in the opinion of many others — does not like the Jews,” said a member of the Crown Heights Hasidic community. “When people tell you who they are, that’s who they are. . . . And I think that people are genuinely nervous about that for obvious reasons.”
Beyond Mamdani’s personal beliefs, Chizhik-Goldschmidt is concerned that his language and actions have “normalized” antisemitism in the broader political sphere. “He shows that antisemitism sells,” she said. “I think my larger concern is that Mamdani is going to be seen as a precedent. That if New York City, the most Jewish city in the diaspora, could elect someone like Mamdani, then this is possible anywhere.”
For Libes, whose parents came to America after fleeing the Soviet Union, Mamdani’s radical policy agenda is grimly redolent of what her family escaped. “The fact that we’re talking like city-owned grocery stores and free buses and the wealth tax and raising the minimum wage to like $30 . . . we know for a fact it doesn’t work,” she said.
The potential economic consequences of these policies, and the fear that a Mamdani victory will embolden antisemitic behavior in the city, has prompted Libes and her fiancé to consider leaving New York as they prepare to have children. “I think [New York] is the best city on earth,” Libes said. “It makes me so emotional. But the fact that these proposals might actually be the future city that I live in, that makes me feel very uncomfortable.”
Chizhik-Goldschmidt is also the daughter of Soviet refugees. She worries that Mamdani’s policies will encourage public disorder. In 2020, Mamdani repeatedly called for defunding the police. As a New York State assemblyman in 2022, he continued to label the NYPD “racist” and sought to “dramatically curtail” the department’s “power and presence.” Mamdani has attempted to distance himself from these remarks throughout his mayoral campaign, but Chizhik-Goldschmidt is unconvinced.
“Statements that are made not in the limelight are really, really telling to someone’s values at their core,” she said. “And the moment that that limelight is turned on, they put on a tie and a suit and they learn to speak the speak. . . .We know his views on the police and on security in the city, and they are not serious views. The Jewish community, coming back to the data, we are the most frequently targeted. And I’m concerned that he’s not going to take it seriously.”
Progressive transplants can easily leave New York if it begins to decay. But abandoning the city is far less viable for groups that have existed there for generations. “I think that part of what makes the city is the fact that there are longstanding communities that contribute to the wider New York and are here to stay,” the member of the Crown Heights Hasidic community said. “But they also have to deal with the votes and the actions of these newcomers. ‘Oh, shoot, the city is not safe anymore. I’ll leave.’ Okay. They’ll go back to Michigan. Well, I’m not doing that. The Orthodox Jewish community aren’t leaving here.”
In addition to the New York City mayoral election, voters will also head to the polls Tuesday to elect a governor in New Jersey and Virginia and Californians will weigh-in on a redistricting ballot measure.