In addition to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s race, we’ve been spotlighting two other mayoral contests where socialist, anti-Israel candidates were running competitively against more traditionally liberal standard-bearers: in Minneapolis and Seattle. 

If Mamdani’s bare 50% majority in the three-way race signaled that a far-left candidate could prevail in a deep-blue city — even while dividing the Democratic Party — the underperformance of the two other far-left challengers on big-city ballots underscores the limited appetite even deep-blue constituencies have for radical politics. 

In Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey won reelection to a third term over Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated state Sen. Omar Fateh. The race was close: While Frey held a substantial 10-point lead in the first round of balloting, he narrowly secured a victory by six points (50-44%) in the second round of the city’s ranked-choice election system. 

Fateh formed an alliance with two other left-wing candidates in the race, but ultimately enough people who didn’t back Frey in the first round chose him as a second or third preference.

Fateh, a progressive affiliated with the DSA, has accused Israel of committing genocide, among other anti-Israel views, and campaigned with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who remains one of Israel’s harshest critics in Congress. 

Members of Fateh’s staff had also expressed hostile views towards Israel; his communications manager, Ayana Smith-Kooiman, said in a series of now-deleted social media posts that Israel “does not have a ‘right’ to exist” and “must be dismantled,” and said she did not care about Hamas a month after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks — statements that drew rebuke from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). 

The outcome is also looking favorable for the more-moderate incumbent in Seattle — though far from certain. Mayor Bruce Harrell, who trailed his socialist challenger Katie Wilson during the summer primary, is now leading her in the general election by eight points, 54-46%, with more than three-quarters of votes tallied. 

Wilson, who has expressed hostile views towards Israel, including calling the Jewish state’s war on Hamas a “genocide,” led over Harrell in the primary. Wilson has expressed support in the past for divesting from investments in Seattle that support Israeli actions, which is in line with the BDS movement. 

Additionally, some Seattle Jewish community leaders have expressed deep concern over Wilson’s candidacy and her relationships with anti-Israel activists, including Kshama Sawant, a former far-left Seattle city councilmember who has faced accusations of stoking antisemitism.

However, the race is still far from being decided. Many ballots are left to be counted, including a significant share from left-leaning parts of the city. 

If both of the other socialist, anti-Israel candidates go down to defeat, combined with Mamdani’s bare 50% majority in heavily-Democratic New York City, it’s pretty clear that as an electoral strategy, left-wing activism and anti-Israel politicking is still a losing formula. 

On the other hand, the fact that the far-left candidates were able to win between 45-50% of the citywide vote — with one win, one loss and one race still too close to call — it’s a sign that this brand of radical politics isn’t going away. 

Cornell University placed a professor with a history of anti-Israel activism on leave this week following his attempt to exclude an Israeli student from participating in his course on Gaza, Jewish Insider has learned. 

A Cornell spokesperson told JI that “a complaint was filed” against Eric Cheyfitz, a professor of American studies and humane letters, “who admitted to actions that violated federal civil rights laws and fell short of the university’s expectations for student interactions.”

“Based on the findings of this investigation, the faculty member is not teaching this semester and significant disciplinary action is being recommended,” the spokesperson said. A source familiar with the course told JI that Cheyfitz informed the Israeli student that he was not welcome in the class. Cheyfitz did not respond to a request for comment from JI. 

Cheyfitz, who is Jewish, was previously involved with Cornell’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and has served as a faculty advisor to the campus chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. He began teaching the course, titled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” last spring semester. 

The course description states that the class aims to teach students how to “analyze Indigenous perspectives on political, social, and environmental systems,” in the context of a “global war against an ongoing colonialism,” as well as explore themes such as “Indigeneity,” “Resistance,” “SettlerColonialism,” and “Genocide” in both “international law and Indigenous contexts.”  

Three weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in Israel, Cheyfitz also offered a “teach-in” titled “Gaza, Settler Colonialism, and the Global War Against Indigenous People.”

In May, Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff objected to the course. “Cornell courses should provoke thought and present multiple viewpoints, rather than transmit pre-formed views of a complex conflict, and I personally find the course description to represent a radical, factually inaccurate, and biased view of the formation of the State of Israel and the ongoing conflict,” Kotlikoff wrote in an email to faculty member Menachem Rosensaft after he raised concerns about the class. 

Rosensaft, an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, told JI on Friday that he is confident Cornell administration is “doing everything in their power to see to it that no Cornell students, including Israeli and Jewish students, are discriminated against, harassed or otherwise abused.”

The disciplinary action against Cheyfitz comes as some have criticized Cornell for its decision to allow Professor Russell Rickford, who in 2023 called the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks “exhilarating” and “energizing,” to return to Cornell earlier this year as an associate professor of history following a leave of absence. In an interview with JI in March, Kotlikoff said Rickford was allowed back because his statements were “not in [the] classroom and we have no evidence of Professor Rickford doing anything in the classroom.”

Cornell’s ongoing talks with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions in federal funds that were cut over an alleged failure to address campus antisemitism are currently stalled.  

School may be out of session for the summer, but officials from Georgetown University, the University of California, Berkeley and the City University of New York will be in the hot seat this week when they testify on Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee.

This is not the first time that university officials have appeared in front of Congress to account for the situations on their campuses, but this week’s hearing aims to focus on more than just the anti-Israel activism that has permeated many campuses since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza to focus on root issues, including foreign funding in higher education as well as faculty anti-Israel organizing efforts.

With that as the backdrop, Georgetown’s interim president, Robert Groves, is likely to face hard-hitting questioning about the school’s donations from authoritarian regimes. 

Nearly a decade ago, Georgetown took a $10 million donation from an organization connected to Beijing’s ruling Chinese Communist Party — more specifically, according to The Washington Post, to “the specific CCP organizations that manage overseas influence operations” — to establish the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.

But that $10 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money Qatar is alleged to have sent to Georgetown. According to a study by the research institute ISGAP — which primarily focuses on progressive and Islamist antisemitism — Qatar has donated more than $1 billion dollars to the Jesuit school in recent decades. In addition, Qatar has long had a partnership with Georgetown that includes an outpost of the school in Doha. Earlier this year, the school extended its contract with Doha for another decade.

UC Berkeley’s own handling of foreign funding will be under the microscope during Tuesday’s hearing. Earlier this year, the Department Education launched an investigation into the school’s alleged failure to report hundreds of million dollars in foreign funding — including $220 million from China for the creation of a Berkeley-linked campus in the city of Shenzhen.

The CUNY system doesn’t receive foreign funding. But it is likely to face scrutiny for its handling of campus antisemitism issues, which date back long before the Oct. 7 attacks. A decade ago, CUNY’s graduate student union was one of the first to push an anti-Israel vote on Shabbat. 

In the years since, the school has seen a number of issues across its campuses and disciplines. CUNY Law School’s 2022 commencement speaker, Nerdeen Kiswani, said from the lectern that she had been targeted by “well-funded organizations with ties to the Israeli government.”

Kiswani, one of the founders of the far-left anti-Israel Within Our Lifetime organization, was a national leader of Students for Justice in Palestine when she was an undergraduate attending both Hunter College and the College of Staten Island.

We also expect a number of committee members to grill Georgetown and Berkeley leaders on their handling of campus incidents, such as the Georgetown’s support for a professor earlier this year who was alleged to have ties to Hamas, as well as the more recent call last month by the chair of the school’s Islamic studies department to call for “symbolic” Iranian strikes on American bases in the Middle East. 

Past hearings have proven to be significant moments for some of those testifying, as well as members of Congress. Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) profile was elevated following her grilling of University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard leaders — two of whom resigned shortly after appearing before the committee.

But they are perhaps most consequential for the Jewish students on those campuses — many of whom matriculated amid the COVID-19 pandemic after having lost out on key adolescent and teenage experiences. For some of these students, their desire to have a “normal” college experience was taken from them by the protests and anti-Israel activity that swept across campuses nearly two years ago. But still, many continue to apply to these schools, hopeful that the worst is in the past.

There’s a saying that has floated around many a conference, Jewish organizational board meeting and Shabbat dinner table in recent years: Jews endow buildings, their enemies endow what happens inside of them. Tomorrow’s hearing will see just how deeply those efforts have permeated.