Dear New Yorkers, Jews and non-Jews, I’ve never endorsed an American political candidate from these pages. Similarly, cherished rabbinic friends, including Elliot Cosgrove, Ammiel Hirsch, and Chaim Steinmetz, don’t normally endorse candidates from their pulpits. But these are not normal times, and New York’s municipal election is particularly threatening to America.
True, anti-Zionism is not formally on the ballot. Admittedly, Zohran Mamdani is blessed with flamboyantly flawed rivals, including former governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican vote-drainer Curtis Sliwa. And, of course, we know that everything is the Jews’ fault.
It’s the Jews’ fault that so many Gazans have died, although Hamas terrorists used them as shields and cannon fodder. It’s our fault that antisemites hate Jews and that the poor Palestinian movement keeps merging antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And it’s our fault that this election has become a referendum on anti-Zionism.
Referendum on anti-Zionism
Actually, Zohran Mamdani and his supporters made anti-Zionism central to his campaign. He used his college-age anti-Zionism as his political springboard, calling the Palestinian cause “central to my identity.” He chose to demonize Israel obsessively, even in his post-October 7 tweet, which blasted “Nakba… apartheid… Netanyahu’s declaration of war,” without mentioning Hamas; to threaten Israel’s prime minister with arrest; and to cavort with Islamists who celebrated 9/11 and facilitate Palestinian terror. He made anti-Zionism a cornerstone of his political identity, not the Jews.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander has tried Jew-washing Mamdani’s anti-Zionism, even accompanying him to synagogue on Yom Kippur. Nevertheless, Lander admitted that when anti-Zionists shout the inciteful, hate-filled slogan that Mamdani resists denouncing, “Globalize the Intifada,” all he could hear is “Open season on Jews.” And, while Lander initially claimed, “We’re not running for foreign policy. We’re running for the city of New York,” he just changed his tune.
At Mamdani’s closing rally in my native Queens’ Forest Hills Stadium, Landers proclaimed, “None of us will be free and safe until Palestinians are free and safe. And that’s why, even though this is a municipal election, we demand an end to genocide in Gaza.” That sounds pretty foreign-policy oriented.
AOC – New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – added that New Yorkers’ right to “demand affordable and decent housing, a decent wage, the right to healthcare instead of paying for the flattening of Palestinians and other oppressed people abroad – is not a radical act.” Note the linkage.
Finally, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders admitted, “A New York City mayor’s race attracts a lot of attention. But this mayor’s race is different… The truth is that people all over the world are paying attention to what will happen here.”
Contrary to Henry Kissinger’s gibe that “Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics,” in the world capital of New York, every mayor has a foreign policy, too. That partially explains why Mamdani and his supporters have so pointedly made this election a referendum on anti-Zionism.
Overcome anger about Cuomo's past
That’s why pro-Israel and patriotic New Yorkers have to overcome their anger about Andrew Cuomo’s behavior during COVID and his inexcusable harassment of female employees. In this election, not voting for Cuomo is anti-Jewish and anti-women. It means voting for anti-Zionism and for the October 7 rapists, butchers, hostage-holders, and oppressors and intentional murderers of the Gazans, Hamas, and their cheerleaders worldwide.
Politics occasionally becomes binary. Sometimes, candidates embody phenomena so toxic that you must choose the most viable alternative to stop them. That’s how many pro-Israel New Yorkers justified choosing Kamala Harris, despite knowing that Donald Trump would be more effective for Israel. That’s why that election was not a loyalty test. This one is.
Imagine the day after, if Mamdani wins. New Yorkers will have broadcast the message that there are no redlines when demonizing Israel in the Democratic Party and in New York, despite Hamas’s barbarism and the Jew-hating epidemic it inspired.
So every New Yorker must ask: Who will cheer Mamdani’s victory, and who will mourn it?
I echo the song leftists have sung since Harlan County, Kentucky’s violent 1931 strike: “Which side are you on?”
Shouts of joy will echo from Mamdani’s mysterious bankrollers and despicable 9/11 fans to Hamas’s lairs. That’s why, as “they say in Harlan County/There are no neutrals there.”
The Israeli perspective
Many Israelis, Left and Right, take this personally. Not voting for Cuomo – the only realistic alternative to Mamdani – is voting against every innocent slaughtered, raped, maimed, and traumatized on October 7. It’s voting against my kids and every other soldier or reservist who sacrificed creature comforts, businesses, family routines, their kids’ sense of security, and, all too often, their health, mental and physical, their limbs, and their lives.
Contrast the Mamdani-coddling voter too pure to vote for Cuomo with the transcendent heroism of some Kaplanist protesters. They shout down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his government, and their approach to the war every Saturday night. Nevertheless, they show up Sunday morning, in uniform, to fight against our anti-Zionist, antisemitic enemies, who keep mining deep, historic, swampy reservoirs of Jew-hatred to target us, libel us, and rouse the world against us.
Ultimately, these Israeli patriots, like their comrades, understand that this is a defining moment for Israel, the Jewish people, and the civilized world. They all choose – every agonizing minute they serve – to overcome unfathomable obstacles, discomforts, and dissonances to be on the right side of history.
Fortunately, their altruistic efforts paid off. While more work remains to be done, their courage, their generosity of spirit, their patriotism, and their commitment to Israel, Zionism, Judaism, and a constructive liberal-democratic world order have been vindicated.
At that final rally, Mamdani, this smooth-talking, illiberal liberal, with zero experience and pie-in-the-sky saccharine socialist idiocies that will bankrupt New York, exclaimed, “We are just getting started.” That’s exactly what you should fear, and precisely why you need to get over yourselves and stop him: not for our sakes, but yours.
The writer is a US presidential historian born in Queens and living in Jerusalem. He is author of To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream, The Essential Guide to October 7th and Its Aftermath, and an e-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and Jew-hatred, which can be downloaded on the Jewish People Policy Institute website.