After a night of mixed results in Tuesday’s primary elections, AIPAC’s United Democracy Project super PAC is turning its eyes toward the special election runoff in California’s 14th Congressional District, where progressive state Sen. Aisha Wahab and moderate local mayor, Melissa Hernandez, are competing to replace disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).

Wahab entered the race as the heavy favorite and dominated the primaries for both the regular and special elections. In the special election primary, Wahab finished with 43% to Hernandez’s 17%, and led Hernandez 38%-17% in the regular primary. The special election runoff is set for Aug. 18.

Her record raises concerns for some members of the Jewish community — she has not been supportive of numerous priority bills and resolutions aimed at tackling antisemitism and has been a vocal critic of Israel, including describing the war in Gaza as a genocide and championing legislation in the state Senate on the issue.

UDP’s initial ad buy in the race totaled $1.2 million.

One of UDP’s ads accuses Wahab of being soft on crime — pointing to an amendment she led to a sex trafficking bill — and describes Hernandez as tough on crime and supported by police. Other pro-Hernandez groups are running with a similar message. Another highlights her background and work on affordability issues.

In a page on her website responding to attacks, Wahab’s campaign accused Hernandez of “relying on misleading attacks and AIPAC-linked dark-money PACs to tear Aisha Wahab down.” The page takes aim at Hernandez for having “denied the genocide in Gaza” — she declined to provide a yes-or-no answer on the subject at a candidate forum — and shared a spreadsheet naming all of the individual “AIPAC-linked donors” supporting Hernandez’s campaign.

“Wahab has accused Israel of committing genocide and has separately published the names of Jewish donors to her opponent on her website. She’s pretty extreme in her points of view on Israel,” UDP spokesperson Patrick Dorton told Jewish Insider. “It’s a race where Wahab is talking about ideological issues and Hernandez is talking about economic and affordability issues that are important to voters in the district.”

Bold America PAC, linked to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has spent more than $2 million so far attacking Wahab and supporting Hernandez. The group has taken some donations from an AIPAC-affiliated group. A new pro-Hernandez group, Safer Alameda County, has spent $51,000 so far.

Daniel Klein, the CEO of Jewish Silicon Valley — which is nonpartisan and does not take stances in elections — said that Jewish community leaders are paying close attention to the race, and he has heard significant concern about Wahab’s votes on major antisemitism legislation and her close relationship with state teachers’ unions, which have opposed antisemitism bills.

“That is, I think, creating some angst — or at least more attention to this race — amongst many members of the Jewish community and Jewish communal organizations,” he continued, relating conversations he’s had with members of the community. “These are pieces of legislation that are intended to protect our children, right? They should be fairly non-controversial.”

Wahab was one of three senators who voted against SB 1287, which required overhauls of campus codes of conduct to address antisemitic and anti-Israel demonstrations, and abstained from a floor vote on AB 715, which aimed to address antisemitism in K-12 schools.

Klein said he has not had the opportunity to meet with Wahab personally and is happy to meet with any elected leader. He said he had spoken with Hernandez, who seemed to him primarily focused on local issues and national partisan politics, rather than foreign policy, though he said that she seems to understand the Jewish community’s concerns about antisemitism and is receptive to hearing from the community.

“My record speaks for itself: I have consistently stood against antisemitism, supported the safety and security of Jewish communities, worked in partnership with Jewish colleagues, and defended Israel’s right to exist —  while also maintaining that as an American elected official, I have both the right and the responsibility to question the policies of any foreign government and to speak out when innocent civilians are suffering,” Wahab said in a statement to JI.

Though she did not support the two bills mentioned by Klein, she has supported other priority legislation for the Jewish community in the state Senate. She also introduced a resolution in 2025 with Jewish state Sen. Scott Weiner calling for the release of hostages and an end to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Another Jewish leader said Hernandez had attended various Jewish community events and generally has good relationships with the community but isn’t particularly involved with its issues. The district itself is not home to a sizable Jewish community.

Oleg Ivanov, executive director of StandWithUs Northern California, said, “We’re of course concerned that as a state senator, Aisha Wahhab has called Israel’s defense against the Hamas attack [on Oct. 7, 2023,] genocide. So we’re concerned that she is spreading this debunked blood libel about Israel, which we feel all that does is it makes Jews and Israelis here in her district unsafe. As we’ve seen in many cases, this kind of irresponsible language has led to direct violence against Jews and Israelis.”

Ivanov said he hasn’t had any interaction with Hernandez, but praised her for declining to describe the war in Gaza as a genocide. He also criticized Wahab’s opposition to antisemitism-related legislation.

But another Jewish leader in the district, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said that the strong consensus among political observers in the area is that Wahab “pretty much [has] this in the bag, and that Hernandez is a lazy campaigner.” Other moderate groups that had looked at the district “just have not been impressed with Hernandez,” the leader continued.

The Jewish community, the leader said, doesn’t want Wahab to win, but that might already be a foregone conclusion.

“I’m not in principle against AIPAC getting involved in these kinds of primaries like some other people [are], but based on all the local knowledge that we’re hearing from politicos, it’s not a good use of time or money,” the leader said. “People are kind of scratching their heads — not because there aren’t concerns about Wahab … but let’s play where we can win.”

The leader said they’re also concerned that AIPAC’s involvement risks pushing Wahab further to left, describing Wahab currently as a less-than-ideal choice but necessarily aligned with the Squad — i.e., not opposed to Israel’s existence or outright at odds with the Jewish community.

The leader noted Wahab abstained on, rather than outright opposed, AB 715, one of the antisemitism bills. They also noted that Wahab’s family are refugees who escaped radical Islam in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. Wahab has relationships with some Jewish community groups in the Bay Area, particularly social services organizations that have been involved in Afghan refugee resettlement work.

“I don’t like the idea that the pro-Israel community is jumping into a race they can’t win against the presumptive winner and potentially pushing her into the arms of the worst members of Congress,” the leader said. “I think that people need to play their cards carefully here. There’s shades of gray at play.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani refused to close the door on a trip to Michigan to campaign for newly minted Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, whom Mamdani praised for what he described as a focus on “the concerns of working-class Americans” — even as he tried to explain away El-Sayed’s poor performance in the areas where working-class voters live.

The mayor extended his congratulations from Manhattan to the Wolverine State, lauding in particular El-Sayed’s slogan of “money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all.” Unlike fellow democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Mamdani did not travel to Michigan during the primary to support El-Sayed, but left open the possibility he would visit before the general election.

“My focus thus far has been on New York City. And what I will tell you is I know that many New Yorkers were incredibly excited at the results,” Mamdani, speaking after an unrelated event, said in answer to a question of whether he would consider making the trip. Asked whether he would completely rule out such a campaign jaunt, he answered: “I’m here right now.”

Mamdani answered in the affirmative when asked whether El-Sayed was the kind of candidate he hoped to see change the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, he stayed clear of the issue that fueled their most fervent support online: Israel.

“I am proud to be part of a movement of politicians and candidates who are looking to put working-class Americans back at the heart of our politics,” the mayor said. “And that’s our focus here in New York City, and just from what we’re seeing in Michigan, that’s what Michiganders want … to be their focus come November.”

Yet the mayor struggled to answer why, like his own map in the 2025 primary against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the results from Tuesday night showed El-Sayed performing poorly among the lower-income voters whose interests he purportedly championed. El-Sayed’s strongest precincts, like Mamdani’s, were home to many college students and well-compensated professionals.

Mamdani suggested those voters had been duped by ad campaigns.

“When you are facing $60 million in outside spending, you are facing almost what feels like surround sound,” he said. “People are hearing a message about you again and again and again. And to win this race as someone who is not currently holding elected office, it’s a testament to what he ran on, and also to the way he ran the campaign.”

The morning after a double hate crime targeted an Asian American and a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke in Manhattan, during which the attacker allegedly yelled “Allahu Akbar” and “Justice for Islam” while passing a synagogue and stabbing the second victim, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine offered what may prove a eulogy for a political era in America’s greatest metropolis.

“There is no New York without us,” the Jewish Democrat said at a press conference outside The Jewish Center, the Modern Orthodox synagogue where the Jewish victim worshipped, invoking the deep history and contributions of Jews to the Big Apple.

But Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the lone citywide official not to attend the gathering, seems to wager that he can govern New York City without much support from the dense web of religious and civic organizations that historically shaped Jewish life there and helped guide the choices of his predecessors. Mamdani received only about one-third of the Jewish vote in the mayoral election, but little support from legacy Jewish groups.

One need only look to the state Assembly district covering the site of the assault to see how Mamdani is at odds with the mainstream Jewish leadership. As mayor, he endorsed an opponent of Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay, the favorite of local Jewish Democratic leadership, as she sought the seat in June. The rabbi serves as associate dean of Jewish Theological Seminary, and is the daughter-in-law of retired longtime UJA-Federation of New York CEO John Ruskay. In doing so, Mamdani even spurned one of his most vocal Jewish supporters, former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, long a standard-bearer of a Jewish liberalism rooted in communal institutions.

The mayor instead backed Eli Northrup, a Jewish attorney and activist ambivalent about Israel but deeply engaged in the online left that propelled Mamdani to power. 

And it was this very online, Democratic Socialists of America-dominated audience that the mayor addressed two days before the attack, when he released a video denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even as he admitted he could not honor his campaign vow to arrest him if he came to the city for the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September. The social media post followed days of questions and criticism from local press and Jewish leaders over his continued toying with the idea of cuffing the Israeli leader, even though city attorneys had long apprised Mamdani that he had no authority to enforce an International Criminal Court warrant against the Israeli leader, as The New York Times subsequently reported.

But rather than plainly admitting he could not honor his promise, the mayor spun a real-world, local loss into an Internet triumph: releasing a dramatic, camera-facing address on his official social media channels with the caption “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.” The video itself focuses on denouncing the Israeli prime minister as the “architect of a horrific genocide” — without even mentioning the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack that set off the most recent round of the conflict. Only in the final moments of the video, which received more than 150 million views, does the mayor acknowledge he lacks legal grounds to arrest Netanyahu. 

There is at present no evidence that the video inspired the Manhattan attack, much less a violent incident at a Jewish summer camp in Queens this week. But the video prompted fierce criticism from Jewish leaders — and calls from Levine and other prominent Democrats for a general tempering of rhetoric among elected officials. Mamdani has refused to even acknowledge suggestions that he turn down the temperature. 

He also dismissed concerns from a suite of Jewish attorneys associations that a panel he appointed to recommend city judicial appointments did not include a single Jewish member, despite the prevalence of Jewish attorneys in New York. This kind of political faux pas, committed amid relentless criticism from Jewish leaders, would typically sap a leader’s political capital. But Mamdani built his political coalition online, apart from traditional bases of political influence, and it looks to have endured these incidents unscathed.  

If anything, the mayor still appears empowered after helping to elect three leftist allies in New York City to Congress last month, ousting two sitting members of the House in the process. And the institutions, Jewish and otherwise, that have sought to stop him look weaker than ever.

He smashed the political organization of one-time ally Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), and humiliated the left-wing Working Families Party by using his clout to lift Assemblymember Claire Valdez over Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in the primary for the retiring Velazquez’s seat. 

He also potentially decimated the unique Jewish-Dominican political alliance — the kind of “only in New York” ethnic coalition that once defined city politics — that elevated Levine to power by taking out the comptroller’s most important ally, Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), with his own pick: radical grad student Darializa Avila Chevalier.

But Mamdani is not the only canny politician capitalizing on the emotionally heightened moment. Netanyahu, facing a tough election fight at home, has announced his intention to come to New York and challenge the mayor’s message and authority directly. Mamdani, who enjoys better poll numbers among American Jews than Netanyahu, has already tacitly urged his supporters to greet the Israeli leader with protests.

A collision between the two seems increasingly likely — with potential to again impact New York’s Jewish community. 

Less sensationally, and often behind the scenes, the main challenge to Mamdani’s latitude in government have so far been two more moderate-minded Jewish women, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and City Council Speaker Julie Menin, both around issues of law and order. Tisch, a grand marshal in this year’s Israel Day on Fifth Ave parade, reportedly forced the mayor’s hand on the question of arresting Netanyahu, as her department prepared to publicly declare it could not take the Israeli politician into custody. 

Menin helped shepherd bills mandating police buffer zones around religious institutions and schools at a time when the mayor struggled to condemn pro-Hamas protests outside synagogues.

Meanwhile, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has fought the mayor politically. Her union helped bankroll PACs opposing his political candidates, and its New York branch — closely aligned with Menin and the city’s Jewish Democratic establishment — has threatened the mayor with “all-out war” in upcoming contract negotiations.

So far though, these struggles have barely slowed the mayor down. His social media-fueled movement has little appetite for compromise, at least on their core issues (which includes opposition to Israel). If Mamdani is able to succeed by only playing to his base — still a big if — the city’s organized Jewish community risks getting written off entirely.

A video New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released late Tuesday night — in which the democratic socialist railed at length against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but confessed he couldn’t honor his campaign pledge to arrest him — triggered a wave of warnings from mainstream Jewish organizations that his singular focus on excoriating Israel from his official platforms places New Yorkers at risk.

The mayor’s video — which has received in the neighborhood of 150 million views across all his office’s social media channels, one of his most-viewed posts ever — ran with the tag “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal” and denounced the Jewish state’s leader as “the architect of a horrific genocide.” Mamdani ultimately admitted in the video that his administration could not enforce an International Criminal Court warrant against Netanyahu should he attend the upcoming U.N. General Assembly. 

The social media clip, which accused Netanyahu and Israel of various war crimes including targeting women and newborn babies, provoked widespread outcry from Jewish groups. They noted Mamdani had omitted any reference to Hamas and the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that touched off the latest round of conflict, and asserted he had neglected his responsibility as a local official elected to represent all communities in the city.

“This isn’t just political theater. It’s a dangerous dereliction of duty,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote on X, noting the spike in hate crimes targeting Jewish New Yorkers since Oct. 7. “He remains relentlessly obsessed with the world’s only Jewish state — even as Jewish New Yorkers face record levels of antisemitism and the city confronts urgent problems that demand his attention.”

Greenblatt further argued the video was the product of an “antisemitic worldview” and “the play-acting instincts of a perpetual student activist.” 

The UJA-Federation of New York said in a statement, “New Yorkers elected a mayor to lead this city — not to make Israel the centerpiece of your political grandstanding. At a time of rising antisemitism, repeatedly singling out and vilifying the world’s only Jewish state for perceived political benefit is repugnant, puts Jews at greater risk — and leaves many Jewish New Yorkers feeling targeted and unwelcome in the city we call home.”

“Shame on you,” the post concluded.

AIPAC said Mamdani’s video was “based on a modern blood libel and outrageous lies.”

Other groups including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Orthodox Union and American Jewish Committee contrasted the mayor’s pledges early in his administration to represent New Yorkers of all faiths and nationalities with his use of official city platforms to exclusively pillory Israel — with the OU calling it a “betrayal of his oath of office and his own commitment to protect all New Yorkers” and the AJC demanding he “stop putting a target on the back of the Jewish community.”

“New Yorkers elected a mayor, not a prosecutor of foreign leaders,” SWC wrote in a statement, arguing he had taken the issue beyond criticism of any one foreign statesman. “Mayor Mamdani repeatedly singles out Israel while using the prestige of his office to legitimize rhetoric that further isolates the Jewish state and deepens division here at home.”

The SWC statement added: “He delivered a sweeping moral indictment of Israel while erasing the terrorist atrocities that ignited this war.” 

Pressed with these concerns after an unrelated event at City Hall on Wednesday, Mamdani said he would hypothetically have liked to see ICC warrants enforced against leaders of Hamas as well. Asked if he saw the Oct. 7 attacks, the deadliest wave of violence against Jews since the Holocaust, as genocidal, the mayor called them a “horrific war crime” and “something that should be deeply opposed with every single fiber of our being” — but declined to answer in the affirmative.

He maintained that criticizing Israel publicly was in keeping with his responsibilities to the city’s Palestinian American community, as well as a “universal politics.” He also reiterated that he would not “be welcoming” Netanyahu to the city, and suggested New Yorkers might greet his arrival with protests.

“This is a city where if anyone feels a level of frustration or opposition, protest is something that we will always respect,” he said. “I leave it to New Yorkers themselves to make that decision.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a video statement to X on Tuesday night under the caption “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal,” in which he accused the Israeli prime minister of a litany of atrocities in Gaza, but ultimately admitted he would not be able to fulfill a campaign promise of arresting him under a warrant from the International Criminal Court. 

The democratic socialist pledged to arrest Netanyahu from the earliest days of his candidacy for the job in 2024, and reiterated the promise in the final weeks of the race last year. But days after attesting to The New York Times that he was still consulting city attorneys about his ability to actually enforce the ICC warrant against the leader of the Jewish state, Mamdani finally acknowledged that his office had no power to do so.

“It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant,” Mamdani said, after an extended attack on Israeli military policy in Gaza — one that made no mention of Hamas or of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that prompted the latest round of the conflict.

Mamdani called Netanyahu the “architect of a horrific genocide,” naming him individually responsible for the “maiming of tens of thousands of children as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia” and for the “targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers,” among other charged accusations. 

The mayor further called on federal authorities to act on the ICC warrant, despite the country not being a party to the court — and despite President Donald Trump’s recent pledge on Truth Social that Netanyahu would not be arrested anywhere in the United States. 

“Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City,” the mayor concluded. “We can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people. That is my commitment to you.”

The video ends without Mamdani explaining what that commitment would mean in practice.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani seemed to shy away on Monday from a campaign vow — referenced in an interview over the weekend — to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even as he continued to lob rhetorical fusillades at the leader of the Jewish state.

The now-mayor promised to arrest Netanyahu in the early days of his run for Gracie Mansion, as he sought to consolidate the far left behind his then-longshot bid, and reiterated the promise after winning the Democratic primary. 

“My administration will follow all applicable local laws," Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters about arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — what legal experts and Gov. Kathy Hochul say is outside the NYPD's powers.

Read more: https://t.co/xLADaz8fBu pic.twitter.com/hDC8VCtn9p

— Jewish Insider (@jewishinsider) July 20, 2026

Legal experts and even Gov. Kathy Hochul have asserted this lies outside the powers of the NYPD. But the democratic socialist maintained in a weekend interview with The New York Times that an “active conversation” remained ongoing in the city’s law department about his ability to enforce a warrant from the International Criminal Court — of which the U.S. is not a member — to take the Israeli prime minister into custody if he comes to New York for the upcoming U.N. General Assembly meeting.

But Mamdani seemed to acknowledge on Monday that such a move might exceed his authority.

“My administration will follow all applicable local laws, that is our commitment, that is something will follow through on, when it comes to adherence to local laws,” the mayor told reporters after an unrelated event, stressing again when pressed: “We will follow our local laws.”

“I believe that when someone is charged with an International Criminal Court warrant, it’s something that should be taken seriously, whether it’s Benjamin Netanyahu or it’s [Russian President] Vladimir Putin or whomever else,” the mayor said.

Nonetheless, the mayor criticized Netanyahu as the “architect of the genocide of Palestinians” and affirmed his earlier assertion that the Israeli leader is a “war criminal.” 

President Donald Trump, for his part, took to Truth Social after Mamdani’s sitdown with the Times to promise that Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters on Friday that he had been unaware that top officials in his administration planned to meet with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations earlier this month — calling the decision “an error” on the part of one of his most prominent and politically active commissioners.

Speaking after an unrelated event, the mayor maintained he only learned from a request for comment from City Journal that International Affairs Commissioner Ana Maria Archila and what the publication described as “two other senior officials” working under her had planned to sit down on Tuesday with Amir-Saeid Iravani of the Iranian Mission to the U.N. City Journal, affiliated with the right-of-center Manhattan Institute, reported that the State Department stepped in to preempt the meeting. 

“That meeting did not take place, it will not take place, and I did not know about it until there was a press inquiry regarding it,” Mamdani told reporters, vowing a change in internal policy to prevent it from occurring again. “The commissioner recognizes that this was made in error, and we’re working on a new process, in terms of new meeting requests.”

The democratic socialist stressed that the Iranian mission had reached out to his team, not the other way around, and maintained that the office’s function is to maintain the city’s international relationships.

However, City Journal and El Pais have reported that Archila has taken a decidedly political tack in her outreach to foreign governments, explicitly seeking to engage with those that are “in political alignment/leftist,” including Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a fierce critic of Israel.  

Archila first gained attention for confronting then-Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) in a Senate elevator over the nomination of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, and subsequently ran unsuccessfully for New York lieutenant governor in 2022. Prior to joining the Mamdani administration, she served as co-director of the New York chapter of the left-wing Working Families Party.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday joined the swelling chorus of Democratic voices demanding the party’s nominee for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner, abandon his campaign in the aftermath of a rape allegation revealed in a Politico report on Monday — a campaign the mayor’s own top political advisor helped start and steer.

Mamdani’s remarks came shortly after an unrelated event at City Hall, a day after a former romantic partner of Platner’s accused him of drunkenly entering her home and sexually assaulting her in 2021. The mayor’s nearest political aide, Morris Katz, was one of the architects of Platner’s Senate run and one of his fiercest public defenders amid prior allegations of personal misconduct and the discovery that the candidate had a tattoo of a Nazi symbol.

But Mamdani made no remarks on Katz’s role in Platner’s rise, and declined to comment on the long-term consequences for the insurgent left-wing movement the two have championed.

“I believe that it’s time for him to drop out of the race,” the mayor said of Platner. “I think the focus of today should be on the campaign coming to a close. And I think there will be many more days to have conversations for what it means beyond that.”

The 27-year-old Katz reportedly talked up congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier to Mamdani, leading the mayor to endorse her in the final days of her ultimately successful challenge to Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY).

It soon emerged that Avila Chevalier had bragged online about wiping her hands on the American flag, praised Soviet despots, pushed Russian government talking points and spread a conspiracy theory about COVID-19 — creating uncomfortable questions for Democratic leaders after she won the primary in the deep-blue district. 

Katz also advised Democratic candidates Clare Valdez, Micah Lasher and Brad Lander in their successful primary bids elsewhere in New York City.

It’s New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s party now — even if not everybody in the Big Apple feels invited.

The mayor’s candidates for Congress jumped out to early leads Tuesday night, with former City Comptroller Brad Lander comfortably defeating Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), a stalwart opponent of President Donald Trump who nonetheless lost support from his party’s base over his lukewarm support for the new mayor and longstanding pro-Israel record. Lander won 66% of the vote to Goldman’s 34%, with 90% of the vote counted as of Wednesday morning.

The shocks to the party establishment continued throughout the night, as Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez jumped to a commanding advantage over party favorite, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Valdez easily defeated Reynoso, 56%-36%, with 92% of the vote counted.

And the capstone on the night for Mamdani’s Israel-critical congressional trifecta came when networks announced the ouster of Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, against radical doctoral student and Columbia encampment leader Darializa Avila Chevalier, whose inflammatory X feed — and attendance at an anti-Israel rally the day after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks — did little to derail her candidacy. In a much tighter race, Avila Chevalier beat the incumbent, 49%-46%, with 88% of the vote counted.

Signs of the ascendance of the far left within overwhelmingly Democratic big cities have been visible for months. Mamdani’s astounding mayoral victory in 2025 mobilized a slew of like-minded candidates to run for office — in New York City and beyond. In Philadelphia, DSA-endorsed candidate Chris Rabb won a Philadelphia-based congressional seat last month. Last week, DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George romped to victory in the race for mayor in the nation’s capital, and is on track to become the city’s next top executive. 

In many ways, Lander was the most conventional of the Mamdani-backed candidates. 

The former mayoral candidate was a heavy favorite from the moment it became clear he would not receive a job in Mamdani’s administration and instead took aim at the Brooklyn-Manhattan House seat, parts of which he had represented in local government since 2010.

Nonetheless, the self-described “progressive Zionist” bear-hugged the democratic socialist mayor and courted his left-wing base with escalating criticism of Israel. This at times created embarrassing moments for Lander, as when Jewish Insider discovered that his top consultant recruited from the independent “Hot Girls for Zohran” social media campaign had pushed pro-Hamas content and anti-Israel conspiracy theories online — and on the day of the vote, when New York City First Lady Rama Duwaji snubbed him by leaving him off her own list of endorsements.

The race also put Lander in the awkward spot of appearing in an ad that aired during the NBA finals with Mamdani and his two other endorsed House candidates, even as Lander insisted he was backing neither of them.

But in the end, it mattered little to Democratic voters, and the mayor and the new Democratic congressional nominee embraced in front of cameras at his campaign celebration in Brooklyn.

Nor did Lander’s non-endorsement seem to damage Mamdani’s other candidates. A registration and turnout operation among the Satmar Hasidim proved insufficient to lift Reynoso over Valdez in the race to replace Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY).

Reynoso and Valdez largely echoed each other in their condemnation of the Jewish state, but Valdez made it a centerpiece of her campaign, even going so far as to falsely suggest AIPAC was financing a PAC backing her opponent. The real money behind the last-minute spending campaign was Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, in alliance with former City Comptroller Scott Stringer, one of Mamdani’s unsuccessful opponents last year.

Stringer and the AFT also sought to block Mamdani’s boldest play of all: dislodging Espaillat, a reliable pro-Israel Democrat, and replacing him with Columbia encampment leader and doctoral student Avila Chevalier. Mamdani declined to denounce Avila Chevalier’s history of attacking interracial relationships, promoting COVID-19 disinformation and parroting Russian government talking points online — or her denunciations of Democratic stalwarts such as former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Mamdani also refused to condemn her participation in an anti-Israel rally one day after the Oct. 7 attacks, a gathering he had denounced at the time, even as Avila Chevalier defended her decision to attend the event.

Strong turnout in gentrifying Manhattan sections of Espaillat’s district, and weak participation in the working-class Bronx areas, gave Avila Chevalier a decided advantage over the incumbent.

Even downballot, Mamdani-aligned candidates romped, with public defender and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice member Eli Northrup easily defeating Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay in a Manhattan state Assembly district with a large Jewish population. Both contenders for the seat emphasized their Jewish identity in the closely watched primary, but Ruskay — related by marriage to former UJA-Federation CEO John Ruskay, and an associate dean of The Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary — was the favored candidate of longtime Upper West Side political establishment.

Northrup, who has expressed ambivalence about Zionism, represented an insurgent politics in the Mamdani mold, even though he is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

In Queens, Palestinian-American activist Aber Kawas rode the mayor’s endorsement to an effortless victory. Mamdani’s candidate to take over Valdez’s seat in the state legislature, Samantha Kattan, rolled over her opposition. Another Mamdani contender in Queens, Brian Romero, similarly romped. In Lower Manhattan, his candidate for Assembly Illapa Sairitupac —like the others, a member of the DSA — won with a plurality.

Three additional DSA candidates tossed out incumbents without the mayor’s endorsement, bringing the organization’s total wins on the evening to six. This means the mayor and DSA can now count on a growing bloc of loyalists in Albany, which has power over many aspects of city policy. It also means a shift in the makeup of a body long dominated by lawmakers supportive of Israel.

In assembling his slate, the mayor spurned and burned allies: rejecting his old ally Velazquez’s favored successor for his own DSA loyalist in Valdez, breaking a reported pledge not to back a challenger to Espaillat and even — as sources told JI — shrugging off a request from one of his most prominent Jewish supporters, former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger.

But on Tuesday night, Mamdani towered triumphant over friends and enemies alike, building a bloc in Congress to squeeze House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

Even in the one contentious House race where he declined to weigh in, to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), a candidate working with his political advisor Morris Katz prevailed: Assemblymember Micah Lasher beat out a crowded and costly field to victory.

Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander has bear-hugged Mayor Zohran Mamdani as he seeks to unseat Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) — but got a primary day cold shoulder from New York City First Lady Rama Duwaji.

The left-wing illustrator posted an Instagram story Tuesday flashing an “I Voted” sticker and encouraging her followers to support the two congressional candidates endorsed by both her husband and the Democratic Socialists of America: Assemblymember Claire Valdez and doctoral student Darializa Avila Chevalier. 

Valdez is battling Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for the seat of retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) while Avila Chevalier hopes to oust Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY).

“today’s the day NYC!!!” she wrote in a story on her personal account. “vote @claireforny @darializaforny”

The post excluded Lander, who alone among Mamdani’s candidates identifies as a Zionist — albeit as one who has accused the Jewish state of genocide in its military campaign in the Gaza Strip and even Lebanon — and who renounced his DSA membership after the group promoted an anti-Israel rally one day after Hamas’ 2023 attacks. Mamdani, then an unwed state lawmaker, denounced the event at the time. 

Duwaji had liked Instagram content from the Oct. 8 gathering and the assault itself, as reported in Jewish Insider; The mayor has dismissed criticism of Duwaji’s social media activity by asserting his wife was a “private person,” although she has featured prominently at public events and granted interviews to magazines.

Lander, for his part, has attracted some fire from online leftists in recent days for declining to endorse Avila Chevalier and appearing in a video from the progressive Working Families Party with Reynoso — despite his also appearing in an ad aired during the NBA finals with the mayor and his other endorsed candidates.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s slate of Israel-critical House candidates has received national media attention for months — but his intervention in a state-level race in Manhattan could also reverberate through the city’s Jewish community and beyond.

The mayor has interceded in a handful of state legislative races this cycle, but perhaps none so contentious as the race for the 69th Assembly District, which covers much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan as well as the Morningside Heights area adjacent to Columbia University. 

The area is overwhelmingly progressive and boasts a large Jewish population. In the 2025 mayoral primary, it awarded Mamdani close to 59% of its vote over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and at the end of May the democratic socialist dove into the already costly race to replace sitting Assemblymember Micah Lasher, now a candidate for Congress.

By then, rival left-of-center Jewish factions had already lined up behind each candidate: the anti-Zionist Jews for Racial and Economic Justice behind public defender Eli Northrup, and a suite of long-standing Jewish elected officials — including City Comptroller Mark Levine and his predecessor Scott Stringer — with Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay, associate dean of The Rabbinical School at the Jewish Theological Seminary. A Stringer-backed PAC supporting Ruskay is among several spending heavily in the district.

Notably, Ruskay’s prominent backers also include her longtime friend and mentor, former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, one of Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish supporters. Multiple sources told Jewish Insider that Messinger had personally asked the mayor not to get involved in the race, but Mamdani did so anyway, even releasing one of his signature social media videos featuring Northrup.

“I don’t discuss political endorsements,” Messinger told JI at an event earlier this month. “I’m working with and supporting the mayor, and I’m working very strongly for Stephanie’s election.”

Mamdani political advisor Morris Katz did not respond to repeated queries about the mayor’s decision to flout a key Jewish ally.

Besides serving in the leadership of one of the central institutions of Conservative Judaism, Ruskay is the daughter-in-law of longtime UJA-Federation of New York CEO John Ruskay. If victorious, she would be the first female rabbi elected to a state Legislature in the U.S.

Like other Jewish Democrats representing the Upper West Side, she has criticized some Israeli policies — including signing a petition from the left-wing group T’ruah in October 2023 that decried IDF airstrikes in Gaza and urged the creation of a “humanitarian corridor” to provide supplies to civilians — while proclaiming her pride and affinity toward the Jewish state, including by participating in the Israel Day on Fifth Parade earlier this month.

“New York City is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and at a time when antisemitism is on the rise, gatherings like this matter,” Ruskay wrote on X. “They remind us of the deep bonds between New York’s Jewish community and Israel, and of the strength, resilience, and vibrancy of Jewish life.”

Northrup, who is a member of JFREJ but not the Democratic Socialists of America, has also emphasized his Jewish identity, going so far as to include an image from his bar mitzvah on his campaign literature. But he has expressed ambivalence about Zionism, though he has acknowledged “Israel exists and it’s a nation.” 

A victory for Northrup on Tuesday would mean more than just a triumph for Mamdani over his Ruskay-backing rivals — including Council Speaker Julie Menin, who leapt into the fray shortly after the mayor — according to veteran political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. It would signify a  seismic upheaval for the district, where a strong and stable liberal Zionist political machine headed by retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) long reigned.

On the other hand, Sheinkopf argued Ruskay taking the seat would show that the old neighborhood order remains intact, and that some progressive Jews may be starting to sour on the mayor, especially after his recent attacks on AIPAC.

“If Northrup wins, it tells you that the deep left is more organized than the center left, and the Upper West Side is going to undergo a significant change,” Sheinkopf told JI. “If Ruskay wins, what it says is that local concerns are more important than [Mamdani’s] movement, and people are beginning to understand who he really is.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani doubled down on his rhetorical assault on AIPAC on Monday, after Jewish groups over the weekend criticized his comments about the pro-Israel organization at a Thursday rally last week that they argued evoked classic antisemitic tropes.

Mamdani defended naming AIPAC among the “monsters who move dark money,” maintaining that he was quoting 20th century Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s comment about living in a “time of monsters.” But the phrase is a notorious and widely known misquote of Gramsci’s, though the mayor evinced no awareness of the inaccuracy — and backed up his argument with statistics from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry alleging the death of more than 1,000 Palestinians at the hands of the IDF since the ceasefire last fall.

“When I am speaking about AIPAC, I am speaking about an organization that has been supportive of the status quo, that has fought any attempt to actually deliver to not just people in Palestine but frankly through much of the region,” he asserted on Monday following an unrelated event at City Hall. “Oftentimes they also support the status quo through dark money, by filtering money that would’ve previously been directed from AIPAC, now through other shell organizations whose identities of their contributors are only made clear after the election.”

Candidates Mamdani has endorsed for Congress have received the backing of multiple large PACs, including Justice Democrats, that received money through organizations that mask the identities of their contributors through the exact mechanisms he lamented on Monday. 

Mamdani himself attended the April gala of one such organization, the Institute for Middle East Understanding — which Jewish Insider recently revealed had stood up a dark money arm of its own, the IMEU Policy Project. This has enabled the organization to pump hundreds of thousands of dollars from anonymous donors into the Justice Democrats PAC as part of a nationwide effort to defeat pro-Israel candidates for Congress. 

The mayor’s original remarks, which included claims that AIPAC and similar organizations are “turning us against one another,” sparked alarm among prominent Jewish groups, who connected them to tropes historically used to target Jewish and pro-Zionist individuals and movements.

“Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns and earlier antisemitic movements similarly portrayed Jewish organizations as pursuing power not to achieve political goals, but because Jews themselves were said to crave influence and control,” Jim Berk, CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement on Friday. “The suggestion that Jewish political participation is inherently suspect, illegitimate, or secretly manipulative is abhorrent. This is the same old story, retold in a new language.”

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt voiced outrage on Sunday that the mayor had not walked back or clarified his statement.

“This is the kind of bigoted conspiracy mongering that you expect from unhinged streamers or white supremacists. It’s not the language that we should expect from the mayor,” Greenblatt posted to social media, highlighting the dramatic spike in antisemitic incidents in New York following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. “This is not a principled disagreement. This is prejudice pure and simple. It is deliberate, dangerous and disgraceful.”

Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, wrote on X, “When you use your position to label people you disagree with as monsters — people who live and work and pay taxes in the city you lead, people who loved the Knicks championship parade as much as you did, people who spent yesterday celebrating their fathers and grandfathers — you are turning people against one another.”

“You want to debate ideas? Fine. But when you call people monsters, you’re not debating ideas, you’re dehumanizing the people you disagree with. And when that comes from a mayor, it creates an environment where people hear clearly who is being cast as outside the community, one where they wonder whether they can safely live and speak as themselves,” he continued.

And Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) noted that the mayor’s speech on Thursday included no words of criticism for Hamas or Hezbollah, or their sponsor Iran.

“Swap ‘AIPAC for ‘Jews’ and it’s the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books,” the Garden State lawmaker wrote on X. “That’s not criticizing a lobby. That’s laundering antisemitism from your podium as Mayor of a city with more than a million Jews. This bullshit is dangerous.”

With Janeese Lewis George’s victory in last week’s Democratic primary, Washington, D.C., is expected to become the third major city in the country, after Seattle and New York, with a democratic socialist serving as mayor. 

Now, Jewish Washingtonians who were unsettled by Lewis George’s stance on Zionism, as articulated in a Democratic Socialists of America endorsement questionnaire in which she said she would reject the “Zionist lobby,” are grappling with how to approach her tenure as mayor. 

Mainstream Jewish organizations tasked with local lobbying and advocacy efforts appear to be taking a wait-and-see approach, while cautioning Lewis George that they will be monitoring her tenure in office to make sure she does not assume positions that exclude segments of the city — including Jewish supporters of Israel.

“We hope to work with her, and we will work with her,” Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, told Jewish Insider on Friday. “But at the same time we’re also going to be watching to make sure that she lives up to her promises to make this an inclusive city, where all feel they can participate equally, and that all people, regardless of their backgrounds, are welcomed — Zionists as well.” (In February, Halber called DSA’s requirements for backing local candidates “an antisemitic manifesto.”) 

Anti-Defamation League Washington regional director Tali Cohen expressed a similar sentiment.

“We look forward to continuing our work with local leaders,” Cohen said in a post on X, “while also holding them accountable to combat antisemitism and ensure Jewish voices are included in our nation’s capital.” 

Lewis George, who has served on the D.C. Council since 2020, defeated Kenyan McDuffie by a double-digit margin, 54%-36%, in last week’s primary. During the campaign, she presented a proudly progressive vision for the city, leaning into an affordability message and offering proposals for universal childcare and housing construction that were described as unrealistic by her opponent. 

Lewis George’s campaign was powered largely by labor unions, but also by activists with DSA, of which Lewis George has been a member for years. The group’s endorsement questionnaire included a lengthy section on Israel. “I will refrain from going on any political junkets to Israel. I will also not attend events focused on obfuscating the realities of occupation or promoting Zionism and apartheid,” Lewis George wrote. In a candidate forum hosted by the JCRC in May, she declined to answer when asked to clarify her views on Zionism. 

McDuffie’s strategy included campaigning within the Jewish community and contrasting himself to Lewis George by saying he would have shunned an endorsement from DSA and that he would be a mayor “for all D.C.” The issue of Israel never rose to a major focus for the campaign, and instead the candidates’ approaches to the city’s economic challenges — and its complicated relationship with President Donald Trump and federal oversight — proved to be driving factors in the race. 

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld served for nearly 20 years as the rabbi at Ohev Sholom Congregation, an Orthodox synagogue in Lewis George’s ward. He now runs a small yeshiva in the area, and told JI he is concerned about her election as mayor.

“We need to be on guard. We need to be ready to challenge her, and [these are] concerning times,” said Herzfeld, who told JI he never heard back from her office when he reached out after she was elected to the D.C. Council in 2020. “She’s clearly surrounded herself with people who are anti-Zionists.”

After the Associated Press called the race for her on Thursday, Lewis George hosted a press conference at Busboys and Poets, a Washington bookstore and restaurant that regularly hosts speakers with an anti-Israel bent. (Its 14th Street location, where Lewis George spoke, has a mural painted on the wall showing a group of left-wing leaders and activists sitting at a table together; one of the legs of the table has the words “Long Live the Intifada” painted on top of it, and another says “From the River to the Sea, free Palestine.”)

Lewis George touted “the broad coalition I was able to build,” and specifically mentioned Jews United for Justice, a left-wing Jewish group that supported her campaign. 

“So many different people came into the JUFJ campaign fund because they were excited about Janeese, and I think that really speaks to something special about this election,” JUFJ’s D.C. director, Yael Shafritz, told JI. Shafritz said JUFJ does not take foreign policy issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into account when supporting candidates, but that its members felt Lewis George had taken a strong position on antisemitism.

“All the candidates we endorsed actually gave incredible answers about how they would support the Jewish community around fighting antisemitism,” Shafritz said. After Lewis George met with Washington rabbis in March following the release of the DSA endorsement questionnaire, she released a statement saying it is not a conflict to support “Palestinian human rights” and to “stand firm in my commitment against antisemitism.” 

Lewis George represents Ward Four, which encompasses several neighborhoods in the northernmost part of Washington, including Petworth, Brightwood, Fort Totten, Sixteenth Street Heights and Shepherd Park. The district includes two synagogues — the Orthodox Ohev Sholom and the Conservative Tifereth Israel Congregation — and Milton Gottesman Jewish Day school, a pluralistic pre-K-8 school. 

“There’s a lot of very progressive Jews in Ward Four, and they seem to support her and not have antisemitism as a central campaign issue,” said one of Lewis George’s Ward Four constituents, who requested anonymity because her job does not allow her to speak to the media. “I think there’s an equal amount of Jews like me who want to support her on social policies because we think they’ll make D.C. better, but antisemitism was my number one campaign issue, and how you handle antisemitism. I don’t feel confident that she’ll do much to battle it.” 

Abetting two recently established PACs spending millions to defeat two of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s candidates for Congress is a veteran politician who sought Gracie Mansion last year — former City Comptroller Scott Stringer, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the committees and their activities.

Stringer declined to comment on the record for this story. But Jewish Insider first reported in March that the Upper West Side Democrat was a key force behind a political committee, Next NYC PAC, committed to defeating the Democratic Socialists of America’s candidates for Assembly and state Senate.

According to several individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their relationships, the team behind the Progressive Unity Fund and Real Fight NYC PACs — which have released a wave of ads attacking activist Darializa Avila Chevalier and Assemblymember Claire Valdez, Mamdani’s candidates to defeat Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) and replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), respectively — overlaps considerably with the personnel behind Next NYC PAC. This includes consultant David Keith, as well as the firm of longtime Rahm Emanuel operative Greg Goldner, who ran former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign for mayor in the last weeks of the 2025 race.

However, sources said Goldner was not personally involved in either PAC, which have each made only a few minimal disclosures to date, although an employee of his Next Public Affairs appears in the source code of Progressive Unity Fund’s webpage. Goldner and Next Public Affairs did not respond to a request for comment from JI.

Stringer has no formal position or title with either group, sources said, but has been deeply involved in their organization and operations. His former comptroller campaign and inaugural committee treasurer, Peter Frank, holds the same role with Progressive Unity Fund. Frank told JI he had “nothing to offer” for this story.

Stringer recently shared an ad from Progressive Unity Fund attacking Avila Chevalier on his X account.

Stringer also provides a key link to the primary funder of both PACs, the American Federation of Teachers. AFT President Randi Weingarten — who formerly led the New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, which has deep ties to Stringer and the Upper West Side Democratic establishment — confirmed to City & State on Tuesday that her union was underwriting the ads attacking Valdez and Avila Chevalier.

In the interview, Weingarten rejected baseless suggestions from Valdez that AIPAC had a role in Real Fight NYC. The AFT did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

According to the latest FEC filings, Progressive Unity Fund and Next NYC PAC together have spent more than $2.1 million to date.

Jennifer Bayer-Michaels, a longtime Cuomo fundraiser and prominent pro-Israel Democrat, as well as a key figure in Next NYC PAC, is not involved in these two federal committees, she and several other sources attested. She is, however, working with an unrelated pro-Espaillat committee.

For most of his political career — which included stints in the state Legislature and the Manhattan borough presidency — Stringer counted among the city’s most liberal political figures, reflecting the deep-blue proclivities of his Manhattan voter base. But by the time he made his second bid for mayor in 2025, he cut a lonely figure on the debate stage by declaring himself a Zionist. He ultimately placed fifth in the competition.

Voters in Washington, D.C., appeared poised to select Councilmember Janeese Lewis George to be their Democratic nominee for mayor, all but guaranteeing that she will be elected in November to replace Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is not seeking another term after 12 years in office. The race has not been called, but Lewis George leads by more than 15,000 votes with 64% of the votes counted.

Lewis George, a 38-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America, ran a campaign powered by local labor unions that was focused on cost-of-living issues and countering President Donald Trump. She is on track to defeat Kenyan McDuffie, a former councilmember who ran on a more pragmatic platform that eschewed DSA’s brand of radical politics. 

The candidates’ views on Israel did not define the race, but they were a throughline in the background. Lewis George filled out a DSA endorsement questionnaire early in the campaign in which she pledged to avoid engaging with “the Israeli government or Zionist lobby groups.” Later, she promised to stand firm in fighting antisemitism while also supporting Palestinian human rights. McDuffie tried to use the comments to appeal to anti-DSA voters and Jewish Washingtonians. 

Lewis George will represent a shift from Bowser, a moderate Democrat who in 2019 led a trade mission to Israel and who regularly addressed the annual AIPAC policy conference in Washington before AIPAC canceled the event after 2020. 

Elsewhere in Washington, Councilmember Robert White was elected in the Democratic primary to serve as Washington’s delegate to Congress, a nonvoting role. He’ll succeed Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who is retiring after 35 years. 

Aparna Raj, a DSA-backed candidate for D.C. Council, appeared likely to win the Democratic primary for Ward 1, a district that includes the neighborhoods of Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights. She told the D.C. Jewish Community Relations Council in a voter guide released last month that she “will not work with AIPAC or organizations whose mission is to lobby for pro-Israel policies.” 

Meanwhile, it was a short night in Georgia, where Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) quickly claimed victory over former college football coach Derek Dooley in a Senate primary runoff. Collins picked up a last-minute endorsement from President Donald Trump, while Dooley’s backing by Gov. Brian Kemp wasn’t enough to push him to victory.

Collins ultimately finished the race around 10 points ahead of Dooley, a similar margin as in the primary election earlier this year. Dooley dominated in Atlanta and Athens, Ga., home of the University of Georgia, while Collins led around the rest of the state.

Dooley was widely seen as the more moderate and more electable of the two Republicans, as compared to Collins, who has been trailed by a series of scandals. Republicans may struggle to reclaim the seat from Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) with Collins as their standard-bearer in the race.

The race may also present a difficult choice for Jewish voters in the state, many of whom have been frustrated by Ossoff’s leftward turn on Israel issues and repeated votes to block arms sales. Some Jewish Ossoff donors sought, earlier in the cycle, to recruit Kemp to run for the seat.

But Collins might not be a palatable alternative for some Jewish voters, having endorsed a post by an antisemitic X account attacking a reporter for being Jewish. His current chief of staff was also recently revealed to be part of a group chat with several white nationalists, where he discussed his efforts to use his congressional influence to free a Holocaust denying far-right activist from prison. He also opposed the Antisemitism Awareness Act.

Many prominent Jewish conservatives supported Dooley in the primary, but could line up behind Collins for the general, given his consistently pro-Israel voting record in the House.

Already, some commentators are discussing the possibility that a decisive victory by Ossoff in the critical swing state could massively boost the rising Democratic star’s chances in the 2028 presidential primary, should he decide to throw his hat in the ring.

Today’s mayoral primary in Washington, D.C., has not gotten the same kind of frenzied national attention that accompanied recent mayoral contests in New York City, which pitted Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, against a centrist Democrat, and in Los Angeles, where Republican Spencer Pratt made an insurgent bid against Mayor Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, a Democrat Socialists of America-affiliated councilmember.

Still, there are some similar dynamics in the race in Washington, where DSA member Janeese Lewis George, a District councilmember, faces Kenyan McDuffie, a former councilmember running a more moderate campaign. And, like in New York, divisions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have surfaced in a way that would once have been unexpected in a municipal election, at least before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. 

Early this year, Lewis George sparked concern among some Jewish Washingtonians when she said in a DSA questionnaire that she would not attend events that “promot[e] Zionism” and that she would avoid engaging with “the Israeli government or Zionist lobby groups.” 

She has since done a degree of damage control — meeting privately with rabbis and pledging at a Jewish candidate forum last month not to exclude people “based on your opinions or feelings on matters here and across the world,” even as she avoided answering a question asking her to clarify her views on Zionism. In March, she said it is not a conflict to support “Palestinian human rights” and to “stand firm in my commitment against antisemitism.” 

McDuffie saw an opening with the DSA endorsement kerfuffle, particularly when talking to Jewish voters, a constituency he has sought to engage. He told Jewish Insider in April that he would not seek the endorsement of DSA or any organization “that requires some sort of divisive pledge to exclude people that are a part of the fabric of the community.” And he has opted not to weigh in on questions about Israel at all, saying it is not the role of a mayor to conduct foreign policy. 

But zoom out, and the candidates’ approaches to Israel and Jewish communal issues were not front and center in the closing days of this race. The campaign has otherwise zeroed in on cost-of-living concerns and a dispute over who will better be able to counter President Donald Trump. 

Last week, Trump waded into the race for the first time when a reporter asked what he thought of a socialist candidate running a “Zohran Mamdani campaign,” referring to the mayor of New York. “I wouldn’t like it,” he said. “Maybe we’d take back Washington and run it on the federal basis. We won’t put up with it.” 

In deep-blue Washington, the threat from Trump has united both McDuffie and Lewis George in doubling down on their opposition to the president and his threat to meddle in local politics, a sensitive topic for the District, which was not allowed by Congress to elect its own government until 1973. 

McDuffie told CNN that the best way to counter Trump is not to give him what he wants (namely, Lewis George): “If you believe Donald Trump is a threat to D.C.’s local autonomy, then the last thing we should do is elect someone whose agenda would make it easier for him to justify federal intervention.”

Lewis George called Trump’s comments “an attack on democracy itself.”

“The people of D.C. elect their mayor, and they want someone who’s going to stand up to Donald Trump,” she said in a recent campaign video. 

Polling in the race has been scarce. A Washington Post poll conducted in late May found Lewis George leading McDuffie by 11 points, with a quarter of voters still undecided. Today’s election is the first open mayoral race since Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is backing McDuffie, was elected 12 years ago. Whoever wins will usher in a new political era for the nation’s capital.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s favored candidate to topple Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) has a history of extremist sentiments — with commentary assailing Israel, interracial relationships, “white liberals” and the U.S. flag and military.

Inflammatory posts by Darializa Avila Chevalier, that have received coverage in the New York Post, Politico, and AM New York, include: lambasting Black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women,” boasting of wiping her hand on the American flag, attacking former President Joe Biden as a “rapist,” declaring “f*** [Vice President] Kamala Harris,” demanding “No more police at all ever,” asserting Mayor Bill de Blasio “hates Black people” and is “a piece of shit” and calling American military veterans “child murderers” guilty of “war crimes.” 

Jewish Insider reviewed additional tweets, including one announcing “I can’t stand white liberals” and another questioning whether watching a film with Israeli American actress Natalie Portman — a longtime critic of Israeli government policies and its leadership — would constitute “breaking the boycott.”

Her Twitter bio at the time of the latter tweet in 2019 was “how communist of you” and included the hashtag #FreePalestine. At the time, Avila Chevalier co-hosted a podcast called “They Are Just Deportees” with John Jay College instructor Nick Rodrigo, who attracted attention following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel when he offered multiple shout-outs at a rally to the Palestinian terrorists who murdered, sexually assaulted and abducted Israeli civilians.

“Shout out to the resistance! The resistance storming that wretched border wall on Oct. 7. They are doing their resistance and they are freeing themselves and in turn freeing us,” he said at the event.

Avila Chevalier herself later became a leader of Columbia University’s 2023 anti-Israel encampment movement.

Avila Chevalier did not respond to a question from JI about whether she agreed with this statement, or to any queries for this article. The Miami native recently told CNN, however, that she has “grown considerably” since writing many of her past posts.

But the candidate’s profile on The Story Graph, a social site page that allows users to share their reading habits, indicates an interest in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated Marxist terrorist group that participated in the 2023 assault. The page lists her as “Currently Reading” Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz  — and also The Trinity of Fundamentals, a novel by Wisam Rafeedie, a prominent PFLP member who once ran the organization’s publishing house.

The tome was translated and published by 1804 Books, an arm of the People’s Forum, itself part of Shanghai-based financier Neville “Roy” Singham’s international network of pro-China, pro-Russia, pro-Iran nonprofits.

Her “Recently Read” page, meanwhile, lists two books by PFLP spokesman Ghassan Kanafani. During Kanfani’s tenure, the PFLP became notorious for masterminding the slaughter of Israeli citizens and Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims at Lod Airport in 1972, and subsequently pioneering the terrorist practice of skyjacking. 

Avila Chevalier is the latest and last of Mamdani’s endorsed congressional candidates, who also include Assemblymember Claire Valdez — seeking to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) — and former city Comptroller Brad Lander, who is challenging Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY). Primary day is June 23.

As an estimated 50,000 New Yorkers stretched along Fifth Avenue waving Israeli and American flags and Hebrew music echoed through the streets, this year’s annual “Israel Day on Fifth” parade carried a palpable sense of relief. For the first time since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, attendees could swap out their hostage pins and “Bring Them Home Now” signs for simple flags — marking the first parade since the attacks in which all hostages held by Hamas have been released and Israel’s war in Gaza has ended. 

Yet, the festivities unfolded against a remarkable backdrop: For the first time in more than six decades, the city’s mayor was notably absent from the bipartisan tradition. 

At a press conference at One Police Plaza on Thursday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani affirmed his longstanding vow to boycott Israel Day parade, organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which every Gracie Mansion occupant since Mayor Robert Wagner has attended, starting in 1965. 

“I said on the campaign trail that I wouldn’t be attending the parade, and I’ve made my views on the Israeli government abundantly clear,” said Mamdani, who ran on an anti-Israel stance in last year’s election. “While I will not be attending, our administration has been preparing for weeks to ensure the parade is safe for all those who take part.”

Mamdani’s police chief, Jessica Tisch, a self-proclaimed Zionist from a prominent New York Jewish family, served as grand marshal. Tisch and Mamdani together pledged a “comprehensive security plan” at the press conference to protect the celebration.   

Tisch said this year’s parade saw the “largest number of officers ever assigned to the event,” which included NYPD patrol units, plainclothes cops and teams from the intelligence and counterterrorism bureaus, amid a heightened threat environment, including the recent federal indictment of a Kataib Hezbollah commander for a thwarted plot to bomb at a prominent Manhattan synagogue. Every participant, spectator and vendor along the parade route, which stretched from East 62nd Street to 74th Street, underwent metal detector screening, and steel barricades were installed along several of the city’s major avenues, obstructing pedestrians. 

The Jewish community also mobilized its own security teams, deploying hundreds of volunteers from the Community Security Service, Community Security Initiative and Shomrim as well as Hatzalah emergency medical response. 

“We are grateful that tens of thousands of participants and spectators were able to gather safely and proudly in the heart of New York City,” Mitchell Silber, CEO of CSI, a joint program of JCRC and UJA-Federation of New York, told Jewish Insider. Silber called the day a “success” and credited the NYPD for “ensuring that everyone could celebrate without disruption or intimidation.” 

“The ability of the Jewish community and its supporters to come together openly and confidently is something we never take for granted. Today’s parade was a powerful demonstration of community pride, resilience and unity, and we thank all those who helped make it a safe and successful day,” said Silber, former director of intelligence analysis at the NYPD. 

While Mamdani’s boycott was intended to make a strong statement — and received widespread criticism from mainstream Jewish groups — attendees appeared largely unfazed. Some parade participants even mocked the absence by carrying cardboard cutouts of Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, who is a fellow Israel critic. Instead, attendees seemed focused on the notable figures marching — from politicians from both parties to social media influencers and the largest-ever delegation from the Knesset, including Speaker Amir Ohana and members of both the governing and opposition parties. 

“Today, we delivered a resounding answer to all those who hate Israel. This was the largest and most significant parade ever,” said Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York.

Spotted on the Jewish Agency’s float — receiving perhaps the loudest applause of the day — were Ronen and Orna Neutra, the parents of Omer Neutra, an Israeli American IDF officer killed on Oct. 7.

State Assemblymember Alex Bores, who is running in the Democratic primary for the 12th Congressional District, was in attendance. Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is challenging Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) in the 10th District, boycotted the event, stating he would not attend “so long as Israel continues violating international law and Palestinian human rights in Gaza and West Bank.”

Goldman and former New York City Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Eric Adams marched in the parade. 

“This is Bloomberg sticking it to Mamdani,” a source familiar with the parade’s planning told the New York Post. 

Moshe Davis, former executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism under the Adams administration — who marched Sunday alongside Adams —  told JI, “There’s nothing like marching up Fifth Avenue at the Celebrate Israel Parade, tens of thousands of New Yorkers standing shoulder to shoulder for the unbreakable bond between Israel, the Jewish people and this city … To everyone who leads this city: this is what partnership looks like. This is what strength looks like. And it’s what builds a future for all New Yorkers.”

Surrounded by city leaders — including New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin and UJA-Federation of New York CEO Eric Goldstein — Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) addressed attendees.

“Today is a special day. We have this great parade, which I always attend, and it’s my granddaughter’s 4th birthday. The two are related,” said Schumer. “We must fight for her to grow up in a world that’s safe for the Jewish people. And I worry deeply about the future that they’re going to inherit.

“The Holocaust showed the world what Jews have known for millennia — that our security and safety is never safe as long as we lack a place of refuge, a homeland. We’re seeing an ugly resurgence of antisemitism across the world, driven by the same lies and libels that have tormented the Jewish people for generations. Except now, they’re transmitted at the speed of a fiber optic internet connection in 30-second clips on a phone in your pocket.” 

Looking out into the sea of blue and white, Schumer continued, “This is why a Jewish state is as important as ever. Antisemitism isn’t going away; it always lingers, always stalks in the shadows, waiting for the right conditions to explode into violence.”

There are only three citywide elected offices in Los Angeles, and one might expect that in this deep blue city, all three of them — the mayor, the city attorney and the controller — would be Democrats. 

But Kenneth Mejia, the incumbent controller who is running for reelection in next week’s primary, bolted from the Democratic Party in early 2024 to protest American support for Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza. 

Unlike in New York City, where the comptroller makes decisions about overseas investments like Israel Bonds, the L.A. controller — the same position that acts as a municipality or state’s auditor, with different spelling — has no jurisdiction over anything Israel-related. But Mejia said in a video last year that he “could no longer be part of a party that pays for bombs to be dropped overseas while people here in America and in L.A. are struggling to put food on the table and a roof over their head.” 

That’s provided an opening for his opponent, real estate executive Zach Sokoloff, to go after Mejia, painting him as insufficiently Democratic.

“From my standpoint, Los Angeles is still a staunchly Democratic town,” Sokoloff told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “I think that it’s healthy for parties to evolve as the world evolves, and I guess remaining loyal to the Democratic Party for me means being involved in that conversation, not abandoning it.” 

Sokoloff is Jewish, which is a big part of his identity, both in public and in private. A video on his campaign Instagram account shows Sokoloff sitting on a park bench under the caption, “What is tikkun olam?” 

“I’m a proud Jew,” Sokoloff told JI. “It has been very ingrained in me that as Jews we need to care about every individual and their well-being, whether or not they are Jewish, and so to me, that sits at the heart of what drives me to serve my community in the first place.” 

In his attacks against Mejia, Sokoloff is taking care not to turn the race for a position responsible for auditing city budgets into a referendum on Middle East policy.

“We have a lot of really dedicated public servants who are spending every day working on those issues, and the issue of the conflict in the Middle East is outside the purview of the controllership,” said Sokoloff, who is an asset manager at Hackman Capital Partners, a large Hollywood real estate firm that owns more than 60 soundstages. “We’re running a back-to-basics campaign about being a well-managed city, being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

Sokoloff has the endorsement of major political players, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Los Angeles Democratic Party and the speaker of the state Assembly. Mejia, for his part, is sticking with the grassroots, anti-establishment argument that got him elected in the first place. But where Mejia was an outsider in 2022, Sokoloff is now the political newcomer, and he sees that as a weak spot for Mejia.

“He has a record at this point, and he is part of the establishment. He’s part of the elected city leadership that has allowed these outcomes to come to bear, and I think he needs to be held accountable,” said Sokoloff. 

Sokoloff grew up in Los Angeles and began his career as a teacher with Teach for America in underserved schools before earning a law degree and MBA at Harvard. Since then, he has worked in the private sector, but he insists — as someone who came of age in the Obama era — that public service was his first passion. 

“You’ve got this central financial challenge in Los Angeles. You’ve got someone in myself who has a background in managing multibillion-dollar projects and common-sense problem solving, and so it feels like the challenges we have as a city align very closely to the skills and experience that I have as a professional,” said Sokoloff. 

Mejia and Sokoloff are the only two candidates running for controller, and if one of them gets more than 50% of the vote, then the winner of the June 2 primary will be the winner of the race. If neither candidate gets 50% of the vote, it will go to a runoff election.

Good Monday morning.

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to appoint a Jewish Voice for Peace activist to serve as his office’s “faith liaison,” and cover the criticism by Jewish groups of Mamdani’s decision to post a video commemorating the Nakba as “one-sided and dishonest.” We report on Elon Musk’s praise for Israeli innovation, delivered via televised remarks at today’s International Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv, and cover Rep. Steve Cohen’s announcement that he will not seek reelection following Tennessee’s redistricting. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: former Gov. Larry Hogan, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Patrick Dumont.

Today’s Daily Kickoff was curated by JI Executive Editor Melissa Weiss and Israel Editor Tamara Zieve, with an assist from Danielle Cohen-Kanik. Have a tip? Email us here.

What We’re Watching

• In Washington, we’re expecting fresh votes this week on Iran war powers resolutions in both the House and the Senate. The House is also expected to hold a war powers vote, introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), to block U.S. involvement — including support for Israel — in Lebanon. Read more here.
• The National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism will meet today at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. Speakers include the Justice Department’s Leo Terrell, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), Reps. Randy Fine (R-FL), Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Kat Cammack (R-FL).
• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is hosting a Shavuot celebration today at Gracie Mansion, days after drawing the ire of Jewish communal leaders in the city for posting a video, featuring a translator of Bosnian descent whom the mayor referred to as a “New Yorker and a Nakba survivor.” More below.
• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is campaigning today with Republican Ed Gallrein, the challenger to anti-Israel Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), in the run-up to Tuesday’s closely watched primary in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District. Hegseth and Gallrein are scheduled to appear together at an America First Works event in Hebron, Ky., at 1 p.m. ET.
• The International Smart Mobility Summit kicks off today in Tel Aviv. Postponed from March due to the war with Iran, the event featured live televised remarks from Elon Musk, who had planned to come to the conference prior to its postponement. “My hat is off to Israel for just how much incredible innovation … I’d say innovation per capita, Israel must be No. 1 by far in the world,” Musk told the gathering. Read more about Musk’s remarks here.
• Ambassador Daniel Meron, Israel’s envoy to the U.N. in Geneva, is slated to speak today at the World Health Organization’s annual assembly, where he’ll call for reform of the WHO’s system for tracking attacks on health in conflict zones. Meron’s address comes days after the release of a report by Israel’s Center for Medical Integrity that found that the WHO’s surveillance system has hampered efforts to provide assistance to health workers in conflict zones.

What You Should Know

A QUICK WORD WITH JI’S MELISSA WEISS

For the last two weeks, a resumption of hostilities with Iran seemed unlikely, with the U.S. uninterested in sparking renewed fighting against the Islamic Republic in advance of President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping — whose country is a key trade partner of Iran. 

But with the president back in Washington, the administration appears to be reopening military options — even as Iran continues to drag out tensions by offering what U.S. officials have said were unacceptable proposals to end the war. That extends to Congress, where Democrats on both sides of Capitol Hill are expected to introduce new war powers resolutions this week in an attempt to constrain the administration’s actions in the Middle East.

Trump told Axios on Sunday that “the clock is ticking” for Iran and the U.S. to reach an agreement to end the war. After rejecting Iran’s previous response to a U.S. proposal, Trump said that Tehran has to get to “where we want them to be,” or else “they are going to get hit much harder.” 

A decision on whether to return to active fighting could come as soon as Tuesday, when Trump is set to hold a Situation Room meeting to discuss options. After returning from Beijing, the president met on Sunday with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

In Israel, preparations are being made for a possible return to war. Channel 12 quoted a senior Israeli official on Friday saying that the country is “preparing for days to weeks” of renewed fighting.

Even as the tenuous ceasefire has held, the United Arab Emirates — which during the active hostilities took the brunt of Iran’s attacks — has continued to face drone attacks. Emirati officials are investigating a fire near Abu Dhabi’s Barakah Nuclear Power Plant that broke out on Sunday after a drone entered the UAE from its western border and struck a generator near the facility.

Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’ here.

SCOOP

Jewish Voice for Peace activist to serve as Mamdani ‘faith liaison’

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will appoint Rabbi Miriam Grossman — a veteran of various far-left and anti-Israel organizations, and one of the few Jewish religious leaders to back his campaign — to a taxpayer-funded post in his newly created “Office of Mass Engagement,” Jewish Insider’s Will Bredderman and Matthew Kassel report.

Details: Multiple sources confirmed that Grossman, a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who formerly led the independent congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn, will take on the role of “faith liaison” inside the new department, which has imported personnel and outreach strategies from the Democratic Socialists of America into City Hall. A listing for the position posted on May 1 shows a salary in the $90,000 to $110,000 range, and indicates Grossman will be responsible for engaging the city’s Jewish religious community.

Read the full story here.

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NAKBA DAY BLOWBACK

Jewish leaders blast Mamdani’s ‘one-sided and dishonest’ Nakba video

Shortly before the start of Shabbat on Friday — and days ahead of a Shavuot event at Gracie Mansion — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a video marking what Palestinians refer to as Nakba Day, sparking a wave of outrage among Jewish leaders for its failure to acknowledge crucial facts surrounding the birth of the State of Israel, Jewish Insider’s Will Bredderman reports.

Zoom out: Mamdani’s video featured Inea Bushaq, a translator of Bosnian descent, part of a community that arrived in the Ottoman-ruled Holy Land in the late 19th century, contemporaneous with Zionist settlement. In his accompanying tweet from his official government account, the mayor referred to her as a “New Yorker and a Nakba survivor.” Jewish leaders noted that Mamdani’s account ignored the massacres and expulsions of Jewish communities that invading Arab forces carried out during the war — and the subsequent purges of Mizrahi Jewish populations across the Middle East in the years that followed.

Read the full story here.

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CAMPAIGN COMPANY

Claire Valdez sat for interview with Twitch streamer who called Jews ‘demonic ethnicity’

New York state Assemblymember Claire Valdez, a far-left Democrat now campaigning to fill an open House seat covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens, sat for a friendly interview released on Friday with a Twitch streamer who was once suspended from the platform for calling Jews a “demonic ethnicity,” Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.

Problematic platform: Valdez, who is backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter, joined a nearly hour-long virtual conversation with Michael Beyer, a fellow DSA member who uses the online moniker “Mike from PA” and has drawn criticism for invoking antisemitic rhetoric about Jews and Israel.

Read the full story here.

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BAYOU BUST

Sen. Bill Cassidy defeated by Trump-endorsed challenger in Louisiana Senate primary

Dogged by his vote to impeach President Donald Trump in 2021, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) lost his bid for reelection on Saturday night, finishing in third place in the Louisiana Republican primary behind Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA) and state Treasurer John Fleming, Jewish Insider’s Josh Kraushaar reports.

State of play: Letlow and Fleming, the top two finishers, will now compete in a runoff, which will be held on June 27. Cassidy received 25% of the primary vote, lagging well behind Letlow, who received 45% of the vote, and Fleming, who won 28%. The race offered another strong signal that Trump’s backing is the most important factor in Republican nomination fights.

Read the full story here.

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ON THE OUTS

Longtime Jewish Rep. Steve Cohen announces retirement following Tenn. redistricting

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) will retire from the House after 20 years, following a redistricting push by Tennessee Republicans that carved up his Memphis district, ending his reelection campaign, Cohen announced on Friday, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Background: Cohen, 76, was the first Jewish person to represent Tennessee in Congress, and long stood out as a white, Jewish lawmaker representing a majority-Black district in the South, a rare profile in Congress. Prior to the redistricting move, which was fueled by a recent Supreme Court decision allowing states to eliminate some majority-minority districts, Cohen faced a challenge from far-left state Rep. Justin Pearson.

Read the full story here.

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HELPING HAND

Cory Booker to rally with Sharif Street in last-minute boost against far-left challenger

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is set to attend a rally with Pennsylvania state Sen. Sharif Street on Monday, a last-minute boost for Street’s campaign ahead of his Tuesday congressional primary in Philadelphia where his challenger, far-left state Sen. Chris Rabb (who rallied with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the weekend), is favored to win, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Booker boost: Local analysts say that the appearance by Booker — a well-known face to local voters across the Delaware River from his home state — should help Street’s campaign, but were skeptical that it would be enough to help him beat Rabb. One local Democratic strategist said that they don’t expect Street to win, but he remains a viable candidate, with support from many local Democrats including Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker.

Read the full story here.

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Worthy Reads

Hakeem’s Highest Hurdle: The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle looks at House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-NY) challenging path to retake the House. “Ironically, one of the few issues that Jeffries is identified with is the very topic that now most threatens to divide the Democratic Party. From his earliest days in politics, Jeffries has been a strong supporter of Israel, taking his first trip there when he was in the State Assembly and visiting five more times with AIPAC as a member of Congress… For most of Jeffries’s career, his pro-Israel position was in line with mainstream Democratic sentiment… last summer, he skipped the annual trip to Israel for first-term House Democrats, which is sponsored by AIPAC; two years earlier, he’d helped lead it.” [NewYorker]

Kristof Crisis: Puck News’ Dylan Byers looks at the debate in The New York Times’ newsroom over columnist Nicholas Kristof’s recent opinion piece alleging sadistic human rights violations targeting Palestinian prisoners in Israel. “Nevertheless, many Times journalists told me they remain suspicious of Nick’s sourcing for the most incendiary allegations, skeptical that those sources would have cleared the standards of the newsroom rather than Opinion, and mildly miffed at the Pulitzer-eager columnist for bringing scrutiny on the paper in a piece that should have been in their jurisdiction. Above all else, many seemed exasperated by what they viewed as another instance of the Times brand being undercut by the actions of another department that, they feel, is not held to the same standards.” [Puck]

Overwhelming Force: In The Wall Street Journal, Seth Cropsey considers how the U.S. should approach renewed warfare against Iran. “Mr. Trump has a narrow window in which to end this crisis favorably, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and ensure an economic rebound while securing American interests and prestige. But that requires deploying the full spectrum of American power. … Mr. Trump’s objective shouldn’t be to bluff the Iranians out. Instead it should be to demonstrate that if push comes to shove, the U.S. will commit to an overwhelming confrontation that breaks the Iranian state economically and politically.” [WSJ]

Dumont’s Bet: Bloomberg’s Randall Williams and Christopher Beam spotlight Las Vegas Sands CEO Patrick Dumont, the son-in-law of Dr. Miriam Adelson who, with the Adelson family, purchased a 73% stake in the Dallas Mavericks from Marc Cuban in 2023, and who is seeking to turn Dallas into a sports and gambling hub. “Dumont, who lives in Las Vegas with his wife and seven children, says he’s not a gambler. On the other hand, thanks to his Sands job, “technically I’m on the other side of every single bet.” When it comes to achieving his vision in Texas, he has the money, the connections and the will. All he needs is local buy-in. And, of course, a bit of luck.” [Bloomberg]

Holding Bibi Back: In Air Mail, Yossi Melman profiles Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, whom he describes as the “thorn” in the side of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Critics liken [Netanyahu] to Recep Erdoğan, the president of Turkey; Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s outgoing prime minister; and other populist world leaders. Over his many years in power, they argue, he has sought to dominate the media, weaken law enforcement, and bend the judiciary to political ends. Standing in his way is Baharav-Miara, whose dual role is unusual by international standards. As law professor Yaniv Roznai explains, Israel’s attorney general serves both as the government’s head prosecutor and its legal adviser.” [AirMail]

Pictures at a Roundup: In The New York Times, Jean-Marc Dreyfus reflects on the discovery of dozens of photographs of roundups of Parisian Jews during World War II that were taken to be used as Nazi propaganda and are newly on display at the city’s Holocaust memorial. “They remind us that the past is never entirely buried, and that images can unexpectedly return to challenge the void of memory and representation. They function today not as propaganda, the purpose for which they were originally produced, but as fragments of truth — painful, incomplete and indispensable — that allow us to better understand the way the roundup was organized and conducted and also to get a glimpse of the victims’ shock, fear and pain.” [NYTimes]

Word on the Street

U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack met on Sunday with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in Riyadh…

The New York Times reports on a second Israeli military outpost in the Iraqi desert that was used during combat against Iran, shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of an initial base… 

The IDF killed Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the most senior remaining Hamas commander in the enclave, in a Friday strike, according to a joint statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Shea reports…

Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) endorsed Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the hotly contested Michigan Senate Democratic primary… 

Reps. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Yvette Clarke (D-NY) introduced a resolution, “recognizing, from Chicago to Palestine to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Puerto Rico, that the pain, violence, and oppression the global majority experiences are interconnected, acknowledges that the future must be self-determined, and affirms our humanity and dignity through a renewed mandate for human rights.” The resolution calls for a grab bag of far-left academic and policy priorities, ranging from  defunding the Department of Defense to ending “carceral punishment”…

Federal authorities have charged an Iran-backed militia commander with plotting to attack Jewish sites in New York City and Los Angeles, JI’s Haley Cohen reports…

Federal prosecutors in Washington will seek the death penalty against the Illinois man accused of killing two Israeli Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum last May…

The Yeshiva World does a deep dive into the White House’s celebration of Shabbat over the weekend, coinciding with Rededicate 250 celebrations that took place over the weekend…

The Rededicate 250 events included an hours-long Christian prayer rally on the National Mall, which included remarks from Rabbi Meir Soloveichik…

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who has often criticized the evolution of his party, announced the launch of an eponymous leadership Institute at Maryland’s Washington College aimed at fixing what he called a “broken” two-party system after vowing not to seek elected office again…

Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, who will face the winner of next week’s GOP Senate primary in Texas in November, said he will not campaign with Maureen Galindo, a Democratic House candidate who has leaned heavily into antisemitic conspiracy theories as she mounts her campaign for the state’s 35th Congressional District…

The New York Times spotlights the New York state Assembly race for the seat being vacated by Micah Lasher as he mounts a congressional bid; the race pits Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay against public defender Eli Northrup, with the Times noting that both candidates have “cited their faith as drivers of their political ambitions, pointing to Judaism’s teachings and their own unique backgrounds”…

Jewish groups in the U.K., including Community Security Trust and the Jewish Leadership Council, are calling on the government to bar far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who has events scheduled in London next month, from entering the country over his past antisemitic rhetoric…

The U.K. group Parents Against Antisemitism released a report detailing how Jewish students are “routinely bullied” by classmates, describing incidents including praise for Adolf Hitler, threats of violence and Nazi graffiti on school buildings…

Authorities in London arrested 20 people at a pair of dueling rallies on Saturday, one organized by far-right figure Tommy Robinson, and the other organized by far-left activists that included anti-Israel elements…

The New York Times looks at how the war with Iran and Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz have collectively dealt a severe economic blow to Qatar, which since February has been unable to move gas, the Gulf nation’s primary export, out of the country…

The Financial Times spotlights the role of Islamist forces bolstering the Sudanese Armed Forces as the U.S., Israel and the United Arab Emirates prioritize ending the “residual Iranian influence and weapons flows” to the African nation…

Somaliland’s ambassador to Israel, Mohamed Hagi, presented his credentials to Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday…

Israel is moving forward with plans to create a museum, IDF enlistment office and offices for the defense ministry on the site that was previously home to the east Jerusalem headquarters of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which was banned by Israel last year…

Computer science researcher Peter Neumann died at 93…

Pic of the Day

Israeli singer Noam Bettan, performing “Michelle,” finished second behind Bulgaria at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night in Vienna. Bettan amassed 123 points from the juries from participating countries, and an additional 220 in the televote, but still fell short of Bulgarian singer Dara’s “Bangaranga,” which garnered 516 votes.

Birthdays

Pioneer of the corporate investigations industry, he is now chairman and co-founder of K2 Integrity and Kroll Bond Rating Agency, Jules B. Kroll turns 85…

Leader and rebbe of the Hasidic dynasty of Ger since 1996, Rabbi Yaakov Aryeh Alter turns 87… Best-selling author of nine spy thriller novels, he has served in both the U.S. and the Israeli armies, Andrew Gary Kaplan turns 85… Widow of Bernard “Bernie” Madoff, Ruth Madoff turns 85… Retired New York Times columnist and editorial writer, he was the NYT’s Jerusalem correspondent for four years in the early 1990s, Clyde Haberman turns 81… President of Everest Management and trustee of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, Gary Kopff turns 81… Los Angeles-based attorney, board member of American Friends of Nishmat, past president of Westwood Village Synagogue, Linda Goldenberg Mayman… Longtime Washington correspondent for Newsweek, now writing for SpyTalk, Jonathan Broder turns 78… Longest-serving member of the Maryland General Assembly, starting in 1983, Samuel I. “Sandy” Rosenberg turns 76… Chair of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a former IDF major general and leading activist for the disability community, Doron Almog turns 75… Senior advisor at Moelis & Company, a former IDF major general, then CEO of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Shlomo Yanai turns 74… Director of nutrition and hospitality at Philadelphia’s Temple University Hospital, Nancy Baumann… Attorney in Atlanta, he was the director of congregational engagement at the Union for Reform Judaism for nine years, Alan Kitey… Film producer and CEO of Miramax, Jonathan Glickman turns 57… Venture capitalist and author of a book on business principles derived from the Book of Genesis, Michael A. Eisenberg turns 55… CEO at Waze from 2009 to 2021, Noam Bardin… VP for communications strategy at Strategic Marketing Innovations (SMI), Bryan Bender turns 54… Former head of development at NYC charter school system Uncommon Schools, Sarah Danzig… Author of Substack-based newsletter and blog “Slow Boring,” he was a co-founder of Vox, Matthew Yglesias turns 45… Founder of London-based Tech With Intention, Eliza Krigman… Staffer for the Senate Armed Services Committee, Eric Trager… Founder of Satori Global Media, Joshua Lederman… Former acting under secretary of defense for intelligence and security, then a member of the National Archives Public Interest Declassification Board, Ezra Asa Cohen turns 40… Tech entrepreneur in the AI and gaming space, Dan Garon… Co-founder of Rebel (formerly known as Rebelmail), then acquired by Salesforce, Joe Teplow… Managing associate in the D.C. office of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, Lauren DePinto Bomberger… Journalist and podcast producer, Netanel “Tani” Levitt… Director of strategic partnerships at Anduril Industries, Sofia Rose Gross Haft… Five-time member of the U.S. Women’s National Gymnastics Team, now a business manager in the office of the CIO at Citadel, Samantha “Sami” Shapiro turns 33… Chief development officer at TAMID Group, Rachel Philipson Marsh… 

Shortly before the start of Shabbat on Friday — and days ahead of a Shavuot event at Gracie Mansion — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a video for “Nakba Day” that sparked a wave of outrage among Jewish leaders for its failure to acknowledge crucial facts surrounding the birth of the State of Israel.

Mamdani’s video featured Inea Bushaq, a translator of Bosnian descent, part of a community that arrived in the Ottoman-ruled Holy Land in the late 19th century, contemporaneous with Zionist settlement. In his accompanying tweet from his official government account, the mayor referred to her as a “New Yorker and a Nakba survivor.”

“Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed,” the mayor wrote.

The term nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, gained currency through the work of the midcentury Syrian writer Constantin Zureiq — who used it to broadly refer to the defeat of Arab countries in their attempted campaign of annihilation against the fledgling Jewish State in 1948-1949. Like many of his intellectual contemporaries, Zureiq viewed the Arabs as a single people and hoped that the loss might become the starting point for a program of modernization and unification across the Arab world.

But as Israel emerged victorious from several subsequent clashes with its rivals, and the pan-Arabist cause foundered, the term became a rallying cry for Palestinian nationalism in particular.

Jewish leaders noted that Mamdani’s account ignored the massacres and expulsions of Jewish communities that invading Arab forces carried out during the war — and the subsequent purges of Mizrahi Jewish populations across the Middle East in the years that followed. Israel took in more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, who today form the majority of the country’s Jewish population, while Arab countries other than Jordan refused to grant citizenship rights to Palestinians.

“I have largely remained silent in public since January 1 because I believe criticism should be constructive and focused,” wrote Brooklyn Lubavitcher Rabbi Yaacov Behrman, recalling how the Jordanian military forced out the Jewish population during its conquest and annexation of the Old City of Jerusalem. “But this post about the Nakba is deeply disturbing, not only because of its one sided and dishonest characterization of history, but also because it attempts to delegitimize Israel as a state even before 1967.”

Others shared Behrman’s fears that the mayor’s post would further polarize the city at a time when anti-Israel demonstrators have massed outside synagogues chanting support for Hamas, waving the flag of Hezbollah and calling for Israel’s destruction — and when federal authorities recently thwarted an alleged Iran-linked plot to attack a New York synagogue.

Mark Treyger, CEO of Jewish Community Relations Council-New York, highlighted that Israel accepted the 1947 United Nations partition plan that would have established neighboring Jewish and Arab states in the former British mandate zone — a proposal that both the U.S.- and Soviet-led blocs approved.

“Referencing this chapter of history without acknowledging the full history, including the post-World War II U.N. partition plan supporting two states for two peoples, which Jews accepted, does nothing to advance understanding,” wrote Treyger. “New Yorkers should expect leadership that lowers the temperature, brings people together, and makes every community feel seen, respected, and safe, including Jewish New Yorkers.”

Others were less conciliatory in their messaging.

“Still wondering why hatred against Jews is so high in NYC? We have a mayor who is using government resources to disseminate a narrative and incite hostile propaganda,” wrote Assemblymember Simcha Eichenstein. “Oh BTW, what about the 850,000 Jews that were forced to flee Arab countries during that period? Did that simply not make its way into the final video?”

Eichenstein’s former Assembly colleague, Dan Rosenthal — now the vice president for government relations at the UJA-Federation of New York — was similarly outraged.

“Every opportunity the Mayor has had to lead as a unifying and inclusive leader, he has instead chosen to deepen division, inflame tensions, and fail in his fundamental responsibility to bring people together,” he posted on X. “On the same day the feds indicted a terrorist for planning to blow up a NYC synagogue, the Mayor is busy putting out taxpayer-funded social media propaganda. This administration is not serious about Jewish safety.” 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will appoint Rabbi Miriam Grossman — a veteran of various far-left and anti-Israel organizations, and one of the few Jewish religious leaders to back his campaign — to a taxpayer-funded post in his newly created “Office of Mass Engagement,” Jewish Insider has learned.

Multiple sources confirmed that Grossman, a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who formerly led the independent congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn, will take on the role of “faith liaison” inside the new department, which has imported personnel and outreach strategies from the Democratic Socialists of America into City Hall. 

A listing for the position posted on May 1 shows a salary in the $90,000 to $110,000 range, and indicates Grossman will be responsible for engaging the city’s Jewish religious community, the world’s largest outside Israel.

The listing indicated that Grossman will also be responsible for maintaining key relationships with Jewish religious leaders and organizations, representing Mamdani at community events and acting as the primary link between the community and City Hall.

Grossman, however, is well to the left of even some of the most progressive-minded Jews when it comes to Israel. A self-identified “member-leader” of far-left Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and a veteran of the rabbinical council of the pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions group Jewish Voice for Peace, in a 2021 NPR interview she referred to her father as an “AIPAC rabbi” and recounted turning against Zionism while protesting construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota as an Oberlin College student in 2008. 

“I was really specifically taught not to trust or empathize with Palestinians and how to dismiss charges of anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel as antisemitism,” she said of her youth. “I was beginning to criticize the United States and I was starting to feel that way about Israel as well.”

Seven months before the Oct. 7 attacks, she participated in a march on the Brooklyn home of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to protest U.S. military aid to the Jewish State. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ atrocities, Grossman doubled down, joining a JFREJ protest demanding a halt to military aid to Israel and speaking with the Islam Channel on YouTube at a demonstration outside the White House. 

“We are here to take it to the White House to tell the White House and Congress it is in our power to prevent a genocide to stop this cycle of death for all of us — for Palestinians and most especially this moment for the people of Gaza who are suffering and crying out for help, and the world is watching,” she said.

She also participated in multiple DSA-led events protesting the Israeli response to the assault. She later appeared in a JFREJ “New York Rabbis for Mamdani” video, endorsing the anti-Israel democratic socialist’s campaign.

Grossman did not respond to requests for comment, and Mamdani’s administration would not remark on the record about the hire. The faith liaison role is distinct from the executive directorship and deputy directorship of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, to which the mayor has appointed Phylisa Wisdom of New York Jewish Agenda and J Street veteran Josh Binderman, respectively.

Binderman and Wisdom’s groups are also critical of Israel, but identify as Zionist.

One Orthodox Jewish leader, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid antagonizing Mamdani, despaired at the news.

“If true it would send a terrible signal and would be one more indication that this mayor is not a friend to the Jewish community,” he said. “JVP is a radical fringe group that does not represent the views of the overwhelming majority of Jewish New Yorkers.”

The open race for mayor of Washington, D.C., has been largely uneventful ahead of next month’s primary — so much so that the first TV ads run by the leading candidates, Kenyan McDuffie and Janeese Lewis George, sound nearly identical. Both candidates tout affordability and safety on the campaign trail, with promises to build more housing and stand up against President Donald Trump. 

But if elected, Lewis George’s victory would mark a significant shift away from the centrist brand of politics espoused by outgoing Mayor Muriel Bowser over the last 12 years, and would instead hand a major win to Washington’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter, of which Lewis George has been a member for years. 

Lewis George has faced criticism throughout the campaign from some in the Jewish community for comments she made on a DSA endorsement questionnaire pledging to boycott events that “promote Zionism” and criticizing Jewish activists’ approach to combating antisemitism. Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, on Tuesday called DSA an “evil” organization that seeks “to make being Jewish unacceptable in polite society.” 

DSA has activated its small but growing membership to knock on doors for Lewis George, a member of the D.C. Council, tapping into a grassroots energy that they hope translates into success at the ballot box. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), one of two DSA members currently serving in Congress, attended a recent DC DSA rally alongside Lewis George. 

DSA’s Metro DC chapter is relatively small. Yet its current roster of roughly 3,400 members represents a massive increase from its pre-2016 nadir of just 200 members — and mirrors DSA’s growing clout nationally. 

“For most of the ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000s, DSA was a small organization with maybe 5,000 or 8,000 people at the most. I would say the average age was probably over 60, maybe higher than that,” said Peter Dreier, an emeritus professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Then Bernie [Sanders] ran for president in 2016 and started talking about democratic socialism in a way that made sense to, particularly, a lot of young people, and he kind of opened the door to people to be in DSA.” 

Overall, DSA is still a small organization on the fringes of Democratic politics. Even the highest membership counts — adding up DSA’s local chapters — don’t top 100,000. But the unexpected popularity of Sanders’ 2016 presidential run sparked a resurgence of interest in democratic socialism not seen in generations, and that has continued well past his two campaigns. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 42% of Democrats have a positive image of capitalism, down from 54% a decade ago, while 66% have a positive view of socialism.  

“If [young people] don’t remember the Cold War, then what do they think when they hear the word socialism? There’s still a battle over that, but they’re more likely to think, ‘Oh, countries that have more equality, or students that get free or almost free higher education, everybody has access to healthcare,’” said Dreier. 

“We are going to raise money and develop a plan over the course of the next few months to try to make them toxic, to make it unacceptable for major figures in the party or anybody actually running for office to be affiliated with the DSA, the way it should be unacceptable to be affiliated with [neo-Nazi influencer] Nick Fuentes if you’re running as Republican,” Third Way’s senior vice president for public affairs, Matt Bennett, said. 

The key question now facing capital-D Democrats — one they sound unsure of how to answer, or perhaps unwilling — is how to handle an insurgent faction that has galvanized people over its straightforward messaging on corporations (bad), taxing the rich (good) and Medicare for All (necessary), while at the same time promoting far-left positions like prison and police abolition that are nowhere near the Democratic mainstream. The group has long promoted the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, as well as calling for an arms embargo on Israel, and its members passed a resolution last year affirming their commitment to anti-Zionism. On Oct. 7, 2023, DSA released a statement holding Israel accountable for the Hamas attacks and calling on members to take to the streets to protest U.S. support for Israel. 

The centrist Democratic group Third Way plans to launch a major PR campaign against DSA in the coming months, one of the group’s executives told JI, arguing that its far-left positions and incendiary brand of politics will be harmful for the party’s electoral prospects. 

“We are going to raise money and develop a plan over the course of the next few months to try to make them toxic, to make it unacceptable for major figures in the party or anybody actually running for office to be affiliated with the DSA, the way it should be unacceptable to be affiliated with [neo-Nazi influencer] Nick Fuentes if you’re running as Republican,” Third Way’s senior vice president for public affairs, Matt Bennett, said. 

In the decade since Sanders’ 2016 campaign, DSA has had an outsized impact on national politics. The 2018 congressional victory of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a DSA member, raised the group’s profile. A steady stream of more than 200 DSA-aligned candidates have been elected to state and local offices since, culminating with the election of DSA member Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City last year. 

“To the degree that people need to pay attention to DSA, it’s because they built this kind of political machine,” said Micah Sifry, a journalist focused on left-wing political organizing. “In a time when people are, for the most part, not very organized, the ability of any small group, relatively speaking, to punch above its weight grows.” 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, New York has the largest bench of DSA-affiliated state lawmakers. The group has slowly but steadily been gaining electoral power in state and local offices in some unexpected places, too, like Minnesota, Colorado, Delaware and Wisconsin. The group’s largest foothold is in city council races, where a small but committed cadre of volunteers can swing elections in low-turnout races. 

National Democratic leaders are divided about how to treat the small but vocal socialist minority in the party. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) declined to support Mamdani in the primary election but ultimately endorsed him ahead of the general election last year. Weeks later, Jeffries voted in favor of a Republican-led resolution condemning socialism. He has been skeptical of the left-wing ideology throughout his political career: “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism,” he said in 2021. A spokesperson for Jeffries declined to comment this week when asked if he believes Democrats should be welcoming socialists into the party. 

Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has been more open-minded about socialists. Asked by Fox News last year whether progressives like Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez make his job harder, he said no. 

“The party is a big tent. But just like we have to believe it’s a big tent, the DSA also has to believe it’s a big tent, and I’m not sure they do,” Brian Romick, CEO of Democratic Majority for Israel, said. “Democratic leaders want to win elections, and that means a big tent, and that means that Democratic base voters and pro-Israel voters and moderate people who maybe voted for [Donald] Trump sometimes because they’re concerned about prices have to be in the tent.” 

“I don’t think they make it difficult at all,” Martin said in August 2025. “The difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is that we’re a big tent. We have lots of people in that tent from all of the different ideological wings, from conservative Democrats, to centrists, to progressives, to these new leftists.” A DNC spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week.

Brian Romick, CEO of Democratic Majority for Israel, told Jewish Insider this week that he is concerned about the inroads DSA is making in the party. He agreed with Martin that the Democratic Party should be a big tent, but noted that DSA members — who are at times intent on putting litmus tests even on would-be allies — don’t extend the same understanding to more moderate members of the party.

“The party is a big tent. But just like we have to believe it’s a big tent, the DSA also has to believe it’s a big tent, and I’m not sure they do,” Romick said. “Democratic leaders want to win elections, and that means a big tent, and that means that Democratic base voters and pro-Israel voters and moderate people who maybe voted for [Donald] Trump sometimes because they’re concerned about prices have to be in the tent.” 

The questionnaire Lewis George filled out in Washington to earn DSA’s endorsement reveals how important hard-line opposition to Israel is to the organization, which requires even candidates for local offices with no connection to foreign policy to all but disavow the Jewish state. Most voters who support DSA-aligned candidates likely are not drawn to them because of their views on the Middle East; Mamdani’s message was first and foremost about affordability. But DSA’s growing reach among Democrats gave a foothold to anti-Israel views that may have once been rare, though global attention on the war in Gaza also contributed to shifting Democratic orthodoxy on the conflict. (Other far-left groups like Justice Democrats have played a role, too.)

Zach Shartiag, a Jewish Democratic campaign operative from Chicago, told JI that Democrats he has talked to who support DSA candidates generally do not do so because of DSA’s stance on Israel, even if the activists are themselves critical of Israel.   

“People might be very anti-Israel now, but at the same time, it’s like, what does that have to do with local politics?” said Shartiag, who is currently working on a congressional campaign in Hawaii. “I’ve talked to a lot of people, just in general, normal humans, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, I might be against what Israel’s doing, but what does that have to do with the local and the city and the state?’” 

The full picture of DSA’s influence in the party will not be known until all the votes are tallied at the end of this year’s midterm elections. A number of DSA-affiliated candidates are gaining ground in congressional primaries, such as Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb, who has garnered progressive endorsements in a Philadelphia-area open seat, and New York state Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who has Mamdani’s backing for her congressional campaign. 

Still, the election outcomes in states across the country this year will present only a partial picture of where the Democratic Party is moving. In the same year that Mamdani won in New York City, for instance, Democratic moderates Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively. 

The only certainty, then, is that the battle between centrists and socialists will continue into 2028. 

“I think you’re going to have a real mixed verdict, with us yelling about our side and the left yelling about their side,” Third Way’s Bennett acknowledged. “So what that means is, unsurprisingly, we’re going to go into the presidential primary season with the two camps demanding that they are right.” 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced his administration would allocate $26 million annually toward anti-hate crimes measures, signaling that the significant funding increase — promised during the campaign season — would go toward a program that funds both leading Jewish organizations and left-wing nonprofits.

The new funding, part of a sprawling $124.7 billion budget that would resolve the city’s fiscal woes largely by delaying pension payments, would go toward the city’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes — though the mayor provided few details about the funds’ destination in a Tuesday afternoon press conference. He did, however, acknowledge that Jewish New Yorkers represent a minority of city residents yet a majority of hate crime victims, and promised the anti-hate crime campaign would operate “alongside” the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism to reduce the number of prejudice-inspired incidents.

“These are investments in programs that have been found to be effective. And too often the only response offered to a hate crime is exactly that, it’s a response to the hate crime. We want also to do the work of preventing those hate crimes,” he said, adding that his antisemitism czar, Phylisa Wisdom, would soon embark on a “listening tour” to develop a “municipal approach to fighting antisemitism.”

Additional details were not immediately available, and Mamdani’s office did not respond to questions from Jewish Insider.

Initial reports asserted that this represented a $23 million increase over a prior $3 million budget. That $3 million figure matches the amount the Partners Against the Hate (P.A.T.H.) FORWARD Initiative, which operates under the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, provided last year to “50 community-based organizations representing the city’s diversity to help combat hate and bias motivated incidents,” according to an analysis the Mamdani administration also released on Tuesday.

A list of subvendors for the initiative released last year features a wide range of social service providers, including a number based in or supporting Jewish communities across the city. Sources at several of these participating nonprofits did not immediately answer questions as to whether P.A.T.H. Forward might benefit from the new spending — and one, Devorah Halberstam of the Jewish Children’s Museum of Crown Heights, told JI she had “no idea, because he just announced it.”

P.A.T.H. Forward also provides resources to multiple leftist organizations, such as Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, that supported Mamdani’s election through political affiliates. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani reiterated on Wednesday his criticism of an event held at Park East Synagogue the night prior, even as fellow Democrats condemned the extremist speech and actions of protesters who sought to break the police cordon outside.

Pressed on Tuesday about plans for protests at the Manhattan shul, Mamdani released a statement strictly criticizing the “Great Israel Real Estate Event” held inside — which included, among other offerings, advertisements for settlements in the West Bank — with no mention of the previous disturbance the same pro-Hamas activist group caused outside Park East last November. 

Mamdani’s spokesperson told the far-left Drop Site News ahead of the event that the mayor was “deeply opposed” to its promotion of settlements that are “illegal under international law and deeply tied to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.” Still, Mamdani’s administration said it has “also been clear that we are committed to ensuring safe entry and exit from any house of worship.” 

Questioned Wednesday morning about the protest, the police response and the influence his own rhetoric might have on antisemitic incidents citywide, Mamdani reaffirmed his earlier stance.

“I think that critique of the policies of a government are very much separate from bigotry toward people of a specific religious faith,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference. “When we have a real estate expo that is promoting the sale of land that includes the sale of land in occupied West Bank, in settlements that are a violation of international law, that is something I firmly disagree with and that I also believe that many New Yorkers firmly disagree with, because it has been at the heart of an ongoing effort to displace Palestinians from their homes.”

Mamdani also lauded the NYPD’s enforcement of a security perimeter around the synagogue, which demonstrators tried to push through, and added that the right to protest is “sacrosanct.”

But much as the mayor and his allies stressed the West Bank property advertisements, the protesters outside the synagogue did not call for a peaceful two-state solution along the internationally recognized borders established in 1949. To the contrary, they waved the flag of Hezbollah — an Iran-backed terror group that seeks Israel’s destruction — defaced images of the late Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson and shouted “we don’t want no Zionists here,” “death to the IDF” and “we don’t want no two-state, we want ‘48.”

When Jewish Insider reached out to Mamdani’s team about these chants and actions, they signaled disapproval of “some” protester behavior.

“Some of the rhetoric and conduct outside Park East Synagogue — including displays of support for terrorist organizations and antisemitic acts — was unacceptable,” said Deputy Press Secretary Sam Raskin. “As the mayor has said, chants in support of terrorist organizations and promoting violence of any kind have no place in our city,” Raskin added, alluding to Mamdani’s belated criticism of pro-Hamas slogans bandied near a synagogue in Queens in January.

Other leading New York Democrats, meanwhile, uniformly denounced the protesters’ conduct.

“No one should be intimidated when entering their house of worship,” said Jen Goodman, spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, highlighting the administration’s support for legislation making it a felony to obstruct entryways to houses of worship during demonstrations. “While protesters have a First Amendment right to be heard, hate-fueled antisemitic rhetoric has no place in New York and Governor Hochul will continue to call it out and confront it head on.”

Attorney General Letitia James offered similar remarks, stressing both freedom of speech and the necessity of condemning threats and bigotry.

“Antisemitism has no place in New York,” James said in a statement to JI. “We will protect New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights and condemn hate, harassment, and violence in equal measure.”

Council Speaker Julie Menin offered a thorough critique of both the protesters and of the NYPD’s response, noting complaints that the safety cordon set up at the site also constrained the movements of journalists, local residents and even would-be attendees. She further asserted that her own recently passed bill compelling the department to codify protocols for such buffer zones would resolve these issues.

“I’m deeply disturbed by the hateful rhetoric heard last night outside Park East Synagogue. Calls for the destruction of Israel and the glorification of Hezbollah are horrific, intimidating, and only fuel the flames of antisemitism,” she said. “Whether you are a congregant entering a house of worship, a peaceful protestor, a journalist, or a passerby, the Council’s new law will help bring greater transparency to the considerations that the NYPD uses in situations like these.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani took a hit to his political credibility on Tuesday when his endorsed candidate in a special election for City Council went down in overwhelming defeat — but it’s not clear if the loss will lead to an override of his veto of school buffer zone legislation or further stall his political momentum. 

Legislative aide Carl Wilson’s trouncing of Mamdani-backed Lindsey Boylan in a West Side district was not just a loss for Mamdani but a triumph for Council Speaker Julie Menin, sources told Jewish Insider, noting she had lent Wilson not just her endorsement but an effective ground game turning out his voters.  

“It was a resounding dominant victory,” said Jewish Community Relations Council of New York CEO Mark Treyger, himself a former city councilmember. “It’s not just about one seat. It’s about the message it sends to the body, and the message it sends to New York, not to underestimate her and her operation.”

Other sources, some of whom requested anonymity out of a need to preserve professional relationships, noted that Mamdani himself had carried the district in the 2025 primary — and suggested his success last year looks more like the consequence of unique circumstances than proof of overwhelming political support. This, they suggested, meant that members of the council going forward would be more susceptible to Menin’s influence than the mayor’s.

“The mayor got a lot of votes in June from a lot of people who weren’t socialists, because they couldn’t vote for [former New York Gov.] Andrew Cuomo,” said one insider, noting that the seat was outside the areas of Brooklyn and Queens where the Democratic Socialists of America are strongest. “His endorsement just didn’t carry the weight in non-DSA areas that he hoped.”

Treyger read Wilson’s win as an optimistic sign for City Council legislation that would compel the NYPD to develop a protocol for establishing security perimeters to guarantee access and egress from education facilities during protests. The measure, part of the Menin’s signature package of legislation intended to combat antisemitism, came in response to demonstrations targeting yeshivas and gathering places for Jewish students.

Mamdani vetoed it last week on the grounds that it defined educational facilities too broadly and might impinge on union activities, even though the bill contained an explicit carveout for organized labor. The legislation originally passed with the support of 30 councilmembers, four shy of the votes necessary to overcome his opposition. 

As a candidate, Wilson said he’d vote to do so, though he backed off this declaration after winning the election — and then reversed to support it again a few hours later.

Treyger argued that with councilmembers more likely to defer to Menin than Mamdani now, the likelihood of an override increases.

“It adds many more options and tools in her toolbox in regards to how she wants to move forward on this issue and others,” he said. “I think there is significant interest on how to find a path forward on this.”

Others weren’t so sure. Sources noted that Gov. Kathy Hochul has endorsed her own buffer zone legislation, which would impose felony penalties on any protester who comes within 25 feet of the doors or driveways of an institution that holds regular prayer — which would cover religious schools. They also pointed to the city’s multibillion-dollar fiscal shortfall, which has already delayed the municipal budget and become a major point of contention between the Council and the mayor’s office.

“It’s not about ‘can she,’ it’s about ‘will she,’” a source said of Menin’s ability and inclination to force an override vote.

Veteran political consultant Hank Sheinkopf was more blunt.

“It’s probably the wrong fight,” he said, noting Menin successfully pushed through a separate measure to formalize police buffer zone policy at houses of worship. “You gotta pick your battles.”

Sheinkopf agreed that the special election had wounded Mamdani’s credibility, but warned the damage was “overstated.” He asserted that the true challenge for the mayor and his foes will be the upcoming congressional primaries, where Mamdani has backed Assemblymember Claire Valdez and former city Comptroller Brad Lander in a pair of left-leaning House districts.

“The real test will be in June,” Sheinkopf said.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, confronting a municipal budget crisis and local job and population loss, continues to dabble in Middle Eastern geopolitics — with plans to attend the gala of a leading anti-Israel advocacy group on Tuesday evening.

Hours after gathering with City Council Speaker Julie Menin to ask the state for further help in covering the city’s multibillion-dollar budget shortfall — a request Gov. Kathy Hochul immediately rejected — the democratic socialist mayor was set to attend a party for the Institute for Middle East Understanding. The IMEU is a 21-year-old pro-Palestinian organization that accused Israel of genocide for years before the Oct. 7 attacks triggered the latest round of conflict with Hamas.

On Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas massacre against Israel, IMEU dispatched its communications director to MSNBC (now called MS NOW) to provide “crucial context: Israel commits violence against Palestinians daily through its military occupation and apartheid rule,” the organization said. The spokeswoman, who appears frequently in the group’s social media feed, is Diana Buttu, a former legal advisor to the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Though the Canadian-born Buttu joined the PLO’s team after the signing of the Oslo Accords, she later wrote that “the parties should not have started negotiating in the first place” and that talks were “futile.”

Nonprofit records show that much of IMEU’s funding comes through donor-advised funds: “dark money” vehicles that mask the source of contributions. The group has in turn issued grant money to a single organization: its own political arm, the IMEU Policy Project.

The IMEU Policy Project, helmed by its parent organization’s executive director, Margaret Dereus, has in turn spent its funds on TV ads — one targeting Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), but most aimed at moderate Democrats, including Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. It has also run a TV spot promoting the “Block the Bombs” Act, aiming to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel. 

IMEU also operates a political action committee called Peace, Accountability, and Leadership, or PAL-PAC. PAL-PAC shares funds with Justice Democrats, and has spent thousands of dollars this cycle supporting far-left candidates such as Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois and the Rev. Frederick Haynes III in Texas. It has also backed Darializa Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), a major New York City power broker who supported Mamdani in the general election.

American Priorities, another PAC founded by Mamdani backers, has identified IMEU Policy Project as one of its “partner” organizations.

IMEU did not respond to questions from Jewish Insider about the gala.

Despite moderating on the campaign trail, and confronting a raft of local concerns and complications, as mayor Mamdani has continued to espouse the anti-Israel rhetoric that helped propel him to prominence — even blasting the Jewish state from the podium at a recent St. Patrick’s Day event.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani exercised his veto power for the first time since entering office on Friday to block a bill that would standardize NYPD policy around protests at educational institutions.

Mamdani had just one day left to block the two “buffer zone bills” that the City Council passed last month: the other measure, backed by Council Speaker Julie Menin and passed with a veto-proof majority, compels the police commissioner to develop formal protocol for security perimeters that ensure access and egress from religious buildings during demonstrations. That proposal went untouched and passed into law automatically — but the schools bill, which contains similar language but did not pass with a veto-proof majority, was struck down.

Speaking to reporters after an unrelated event Friday morning, the mayor cited what he described as  “constitutional concerns” and union objections to possible infringement on their right to picket — even though the measure contained a carveout for labor action.

“It carries [these concerns] because unlike in the first piece of legislation, which is balancing the right to protest and the right to prayer — both of which are not just sacrosanct in our city but also constitutionally — the second does not have a counterbalance to the right to protest,” he said, suggesting that this exposed the proposal to legal challenge. “It also defines educational institutions in such a broad manner that it includes museums, libraries, teaching hospitals, things of that nature.”

The city’s leading Jewish groups issued a rare united response, highlighting the protests that have targeted yeshivas and gathering places for Jewish student groups in recent years.

“We are deeply disappointed by Mayor Mamdani’s decision,” said the UJA-Federation of New York, the Anti-Defamation League of New York/New Jersey, Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, American Jewish Committee New York, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the New York Board of Rabbis, Orthodox Union, The Rabbinical Assembly, Union for Reform Judaism, StandWithUs and Teach NYS. “This veto is a profound failure of City Hall to demonstrate to all New Yorkers that our safety is a priority.” 

Bronx Councilman Eric Dinowitz, the lead sponsor of the bill, highlighted that it would merely obligate the NYPD to create a uniform policy for security perimeters, already frequently enforced during protests. He pushed back on claims that it would infringe on First Amendment rights.

“Students deserve safety as they enter and exit their school buildings, and New Yorkers deserve transparency from the NYPD,” Dinowitz said in a statement. “The mayor promised to keep New Yorkers safe and increase police transparency. By vetoing this bill, he is breaking yet another campaign promise.”

Sources indicated to Jewish Insider that they would try to whip votes to secure the necessary support from the City Council to override the mayor’s decision. The city bills are distinct from state-level proposals Gov. Kathy Hochul has endorsed that would establish a felony penalty for protesters who come within 25 feet of the doorways and driveways of religious institutions and abortion clinics.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism czar said on Wednesday that his administration won’t replace the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism he wiped off the books his first day on the job.

Speaking before the City Council’s Task Force  Antisemitism alongside officials from the NYPD, the executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, Phylisa Wisdom, said that city agencies do not and will not work off any official definition of antisemitism. Mamdani’s predecessor, former Mayor Eric Adams, adopted the IHRA definition and established the office Wisdom leads amid a dramatic uptick in hate crimes targeting Jewish New Yorkers in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks and subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

“Across city government there is not a definition codified for any form of hate at all,” Wisdom told Republican Councilmember Inna Vernikov, one of the task force’s two co-chairs. “We don’t believe that there needs to be a codified definition at all.”

A total of 37 states, as well cities from D.C. to Los Angeles, have adopted the IHRA definition. But critics allege its assertion that certain antagonism toward the Jewish state can be classified as antisemitism serves to stifle criticism of Israel.

Instead of a formal, written classification, Wisdom, who previously led the progressive Zionist group New York Jewish Agenda, touted “an understanding that we share.”

“We understand broadly, in the universe of civil rights and combating antisemitism, it to be prejudice, violence and discrimination against Jews because they are Jewish,” she explained. “We understand usually what that looks like.”

Wisdom acknowledged the question of how the vast city bureaucracy recognizes antisemitism was “a hot one in the community.” When Vernikov pressed Wisdom on how the administration could address and rectify antisemitism without defining it, Wisdom acknowledged the difficulty, but fell back on equating it with other undefined forms of bigoted behavior.

She also alluded to previous testimony by NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters Michael Gerber that the police department operates off a state-level hate crime statute, which does not feature definitions of prejudice, but only considers whether a victim was targeted because of their real or perceived identity.

“I think what you’re asking is a good question because it is hard,” Wisdom said. “In terms of bias and hate, it’s really sticky and extremely serious stuff, and it’s case by case.”

After the hearing, Wisdom avoided questioning from Jewish Insider about whether she considered it antisemitic to applaud the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel or the man behind them, late Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar — as Mamdani’s wife and other personnel in his office have done.

In his testimony, Gerber said Mamdani and his team had no input on a data-reporting change that drew controversy after the city logged a 152% increase in hate offenses in January over the same month last year, driven by a spike in reported incidents targeting Jewish New Yorkers — then changed its reporting criteria for February. The move drew criticism from experts and transparency advocates.

But Gerber asserted the old methodology was deeply flawed, and that NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who was originally appointed by Adams, had only recently learned of it and ordered it changed.

“That data did not reflect confirmed hate crimes. It did not reflect reported hate crimes,” said Gerber. “It was numbers pulled from an informal tracker that had a mix of reported hate crimes that had not yet been classified by the [NYPD Hate Crimes] Task Force and confirmed hate crimes. These were hodgepodge numbers, resulting in clarity about nothing.”

He added that the decisions did not come “at the initiative or direction of anyone at City Hall” — a point he stressed under questioning.

“These were decisions by the NYPD. We made these decisions and we stand by them,” he told Vernikov. “These were not decisions made by anyone at City Hall.” The NYPD is formally part of Mamdani’s administration.

Gerber further asserted the mayor’s team was “notified” of the reporting change, but “not consulted.” He further highlighted a recent NYPD announcement that going forward, it would disclose to the public both reported and confirmed bias crime incidents, the favored approach of good government and civil rights supporters.

New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin warned Wednesday morning that if Mayor Zohran Mamdani vetoes the council’s legislation intended to regulate protests at religious and educational sites, the city will face “more divisiveness,” calling the decision a critical test for the mayor. 

The bills, which include measures to create standard NYPD policy for deploying buffer zones during protests at educational and religious facilities, face a potential veto as Mamdani has repeatedly declined to take a stand on the issue. He has acknowledged concerns against the legislation from left-wing activists and civil rights groups who have targeted synagogues and yeshivas with anti-Israel demonstrations, and has until the end of this week to veto the bills or they become law automatically. 

“We need less divisiveness. I really hope — and I’ve said this to the mayor — that there is not a veto of the package of bills. That’s necessary. It will create much more division,” Menin said during a panel discussion at 92NY on “the future of being Jewish in New York,” featuring the city’s most senior Jewish elected officials: Menin, who is the first Jewish council speaker, Comptroller Mark Levine and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal. 

The panel, moderated by 92NY CEO Seth Pinsky, comes as the city has experienced historic levels of antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks — and as Jews navigate a tense relationship with a mayor who has held hostile views towards several key communal issues. New York City has the largest population of Jews outside of Israel. 

Asked by Pinsky what advice each would give to Mamdani to try to reassure the roughly 70% of the Jewish New York City electorate that did not vote for him, Hoylman-Sigal called on Mamdani to “follow the tradition of every mayor preceding him [since 1951] and visit Israel.” 

He added that Mamdani already has some “really good Jewish advisors,” including Phylisa Wisdom, a progressive Jewish leader Mamdani tapped in February to run the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. A range of Jewish Democratic politicians and advocates had lauded Wisdom’s selection, though she has alienated some Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish leaders over her work criticizing the secular education taught at yeshivas in the past.

Hoylman-Sigal’s assertion that the mayor’s heart “is in the right place” when it comes to the Jewish community was met with a chorus of “boos” from the audience.  

Addressing the city’s long-standing Israel bonds investments, which Mamdani has called to end in a key source of tension for him and Levine, Levine said the investments “are not political [and] shouldn’t be political.”

“Israel bonds have never missed a payment in 70 years,” said Levine. “And by the way, we’ve had no protests about our investments in Saudi Arabia, our investments in Pakistan or China.” 

All three Jewish leaders echoed the sentiment that despite a turbulent past few years, the New York City Jewish community remains resilient, and urged New Yorkers not give into the rising calls to decamp to Florida. 

“Absolutely stay in New York,” said Menin. “This is not a time to lose hope. Hopefully the three of us here can embody the future of the commitment to fighting antisemitism, the commitment to supporting the Jewish community. This is a time to lean into it as opposed to shy away from it. New York is a city that has been a beacon of inclusion and tolerance; we need to make sure that it stays that way.” 

“I believe the Jewish community in New York City is stronger than it’s ever been,” said Levine, who praised Mamdani’s decision to retain former Mayor Eric Adams’ NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish and openly identifies as Zionist. 

“In many synagogues, attendance is way up. Jewish New Yorkers are active in ways they haven’t been. We’ve seen new coalitions come together … This engagement gives me real hope for the future,” continued Levine. 

“My wish looking forward to the next 25 years is that we see a community that fought — that didn’t move to Miami with its bad bagels — and that we kept this story going of what is really one of the most glorious Jewish communities.” 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani refused to speak directly to his wife’s inflammatory social media history, a day after First Lady Rama Duwaji indicated in an interview she regrets posting a racial slur online while in high school, but stopped short of apologizing for much more recent activity signaling support for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks.

The democratic socialist mayor initially dismissed JI’s reporting by asserting his wife was a “private person.” But on Wednesday, Duwaji made the latest in a string of media appearances, discussing her art career with the online cultural outlet Hyperallergic.

In the discussion, Duwaji appeared to address revelations by The Washington Free Beacon that she had used the N-word on Tumblr as an adolescent — but not the conservative outlet’s reporting of posts she shared celebrating Palestinian terrorist figures, or of JI’s earlier discovery that she had liked posts that applauded and defended the 2023 Hamas assault on Israel.

“I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn’t excuse it,” Duwaji told Hyperallergic’s editor-in-chief. “I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry.”

Hyperallergic did not follow up on this point, and the mayor’s office declined to answer a New York Times query on Wednesday on whether she felt remorse over her more recent political posts.

Mamdani refused to directly answer the question when pressed in person on Thursday, preferring instead to praise Duwaji personally.

“You know, she shared some of her reflections in this interview. I won’t add much to them,” the mayor said following an unrelated City Hall press conference. “What I will say, however, is that she is someone of incredible integrity, she is someone I am lucky to be able to call my wife and that I am proud of her each and every day.”

As Washington, D.C., voters get ready to elect their first new mayor in more than a decade, the two leading candidates — former colleagues on the Council of the District of Columbia — are proposing drastically different visions for the city’s future: political moderation or democratic socialism.

In an interview with Jewish Insider this week at his campaign headquarters in Northeast Washington, former Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie drew a direct contrast between his campaign and that of his Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed rival, Janeese Lewis George. 

“I didn’t seek, nor would I accept, the endorsement of Democratic Socialists of America, or any organization, for that matter, that requires some sort of divisive pledge to exclude people that are a part of the fabric of the community of the District of Columbia,” McDuffie said.

He was referring to a DSA endorsement questionnaire that asked candidates not to engage with “the Israeli government or Zionist lobby groups.” Lewis George, a longtime DSA member, vowed not to attend events that promote Zionism when she filled out the questionnaire, which earned her the DSA endorsement. 

Lewis George’s responses sparked concern among many in the Jewish community, and she apologized in a closed-door meeting with rabbis in March. But she has not offered any public remorse. 

“I think it’s important for elected officials to have the courage to say in public things that they say in private,” McDuffie said. “Any message that depends on taking a pledge to exclude entire communities as a condition of a political endorsement is extraordinarily divisive and disturbing.” 

Amid the controversy surrounding her DSA questionnaire and the meeting with rabbis, Lewis George released a statement last month pledging to stand firm in both her opposition to antisemitism and her support for “Palestinian human rights.” McDuffie told JI that he did not see the mayoral race as a place to litigate debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I think a mayor’s responsibility is to look out for all of its residents, particularly our most vulnerable residents,” said McDuffie. “At a time where the Jewish community is seeing rising antisemitism worldwide, and even the District of Columbia, it’s important that they understand that their elected officials are going to use every tool possible to protect them.” 

“I didn’t bring those issues into this race. My opponent did it when she sought the endorsement of Democratic Socialists of America,” McDuffie said. “I’m not running for Congress. I’m not engaging in the crafting of foreign policy. I’m running for mayor of Washington, D.C., the most beautifully diverse city in America, and I’m running to fight and deliver for all D.C.”

McDuffie is actively courting votes in the Jewish community. He will appear next week at a meet-and-greet with Jewish young professionals in the District. 

“I think a mayor’s responsibility is to look out for all of its residents, particularly our most vulnerable residents,” said McDuffie. “At a time where the Jewish community is seeing rising antisemitism worldwide, and even the District of Columbia, it’s important that they understand that their elected officials are going to use every tool possible to protect them.” 

McDuffie pledged to speak out against antisemitic violence and rhetoric so that the District’s Jewish residents “understand that they have a mayor and elected leadership who’s going to strongly oppose those kinds of activities and threats and do everything humanly possible to protect them.” He called the city’s nonprofit security grant program, which provides funding to several local synagogues to pay for security expenses, a “nonnegotiable,” even if the city faces other budget challenges. 

Born and raised in Northeast Washington, McDuffie entered politics circuitously. He worked as a mail carrier for the USPS before ultimately going to college and law school, in a career pivot he said was inspired by witnessing the death of two friends to the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. He spent a few years as a prosecutor, in Maryland and at the Justice Department, before running for Council in 2013. McDuffie represented Ward 5, which includes the neighborhoods Bloomingdale, Eckington, Brookland and Fort Totten, until being elected to a citywide at-large position in 2022 where he served until January.

His message now is about affordability, a buzzword brought into style last year by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member like Lewis George. The way to make the city more affordable, according to McDuffie, is “economic growth with guardrails” — a contrast to the sweeping changes promised by Lewis George, the viability of which McDuffie has questioned.

“They want experience. They want vision. They want bold. They want change. What they don’t want is more empty promises,” said McDuffie. “What they don’t want is rhetoric that isn’t supported by an actual plan. What they don’t want is somebody who engages with organizations seeking to divide residents, and what we think we have as an advantage is both a vision that is about building a big tent and inviting people in and a record.” 

“We’re the nation’s capital. We can walk and chew gum,” McDuffie said. “I think that’s important for people to understand, that we can have innovative, transformational policies at the same time that we’re delivering core services on time and within a budget that doesn’t default to raising taxes on hard-working residents.” 

McDuffie seemed to recognize that pushing a vision of pragmatism may not be as seductive as promises powered by major spending increases. For instance, both Lewis George and McDuffie want to build new housing in the city, but Lewis George has promised to build 72,000 new units compared to 12,000 suggested by McDuffie, The Washington Post reported. But McDuffie argued that voters want honesty.

“They want experience. They want vision. They want bold. They want change. What they don’t want is more empty promises,” said McDuffie. “What they don’t want is rhetoric that isn’t supported by an actual plan. What they don’t want is somebody who engages with organizations seeking to divide residents, and what we think we have as an advantage is both a vision that is about building a big tent and inviting people in and a record.” 

Though McDuffie and Lewis George are widely viewed as the frontrunners in the race, they are not the only candidates running in the Democratic primary which, in deep blue Washington, will almost certainly decide the eventual victor. Other candidates in the June 16 primary include real estate developer Gary Goodweather and former Councilmember Vincent Orange.

The architect of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s viral video campaign paid homage to the mastermind of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in a series of tweets uncovered by Jewish Insider — posts in which the operative asserted that late Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar “gave his entire life until the end fighting for his people’s liberation.”

Records show Donald Borenstein got paid more than $90,000 last year by the Mamdani campaign for his services as director of video — a role in which, according to his LinkedIn, he served as “primary cinematographer” for the social media imagery that propelled the democratic socialist legislator into Gracie Mansion. 

Borenstein’s Instagram indicates he has since assumed the title of “creative director” at City Hall, and he has been credited for official videos promoting the mayor and his agenda. Borenstein was also featured in a recent comedy sketch starring Mamdani and his top staffers that was shared on the official NYC Mayor’s Office YouTube channel.

Yet despite receiving attention from The New York Times and New York Post as a member of Mamdani’s inner circle, Borenstein’s profile online has largely escaped notice so far. 

Archives of his X account show that in 2024, a day after Sinwar was killed by the IDF, Borenstein described imagery of his death, captured in Israeli drone footage, as “absolutely overflowing with symbolism.”

“[I]nsanely funny that israelis are so genocidally up their own ass that they have basically hand-delivered one of the most heroic possible images they could here lmao,” Borenstein wrote from his X handle @boringstein on Oct. 17, 2024, and just a few months before Borenstein began working for Mamdani’s campaign.

Borenstein appears to have deleted this tweet, and all others referenced in this story, at some later point, though archived images remain accessible.

Federal Election Commission filings show that a few months before the posts, Borenstein wrapped up work for another politician highly critical of Israel: then-Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who was serving out the last few months of his term after he lost his reelection to a primary challenge from Rep. George Latimer (D-NY). 

The cinematographer further mocked the Israeli decision to release the video of Sinwar sitting on a couch and tossing a stick at the drone moments before he was killed.

“‘[S]urely this man who gave his entire life until the end fighting for his people’s liberation with no proxy will look bad when we show footage of his last stand,’” Borenstein wrote sarcastically, concluding a third post with the phrase “From the river to the sea,” often understood as calling for the annihilation of the entirety of Israel between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and three Palestinian flag emojis. 

When one reply compared the terrorist with Tom Hanks’ character in the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” the cinematographer responded with enthusiasm.

“[I]n earnest!!! you could not direct this better lol,” Borenstein replied. “[I] am honestly so deeply moved.”

In another since-deleted tweet, Borenstein wrote that “the fascist state of Israel will fall in our lifetimes.”

Neither the video producer nor the Mamdani team responded to questions about the tweets. 

Borenstein is one of several figures instrumental in Mamdani’s rise whose social media accounts feature explicit support for Sinwar and the terrorist organization he led, even though the mayor has condemned terrorism personally.

In February, JI reported that the co-founder of the independent “Hot Girls for Zohran” social media and canvassing campaign had also shared multiple pro-Hamas posts. In March, JI reported that Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji — whom The Cut described as a “de facto adviser” to the mayor’s campaign — had liked posts on Instagram celebrating the Oct. 7 attacks.

Israeli-American comedian Modi Rosenfeld, known simply as “Modi,” pulled out of a Passover-themed benefit Monday after his manager revealed that the entertainer had been “blindsided” with the news that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani would participate in the Lower Manhattan event.

Quoting Jewish Insider’s initial report on the mayor’s scheduled involvement in the 33rd Annual “Downtown Seder” at impresario Michael Dorf’s venue City Winery, Rosenfeld’s official Instagram account announced the Tel Aviv-born, Long Island-reared performer had withdrawn from the event.

“We were not told Mamdani was participating in this event until today,” the post read. “Modi will no longer be attending.” 

Reached by phone, Rosenfeld’s manager told JI that they had committed to featuring in the festivities months ago — and said the venue should have notified them earlier that the mayor, whose political initiation began with anti-Israel campus activism, would be part of the program as well.

“It’s just inappropriate to be blindsided with that information the day of the event, regardless of anyone’s political feelings,” said Leo Veiga, who is also Rosenfeld’s husband. “That’s a very polarizing thing right now, so it’s not appropriate for us to be attending.”

Veiga declined to elaborate further on his and Rosenfeld’s feelings toward the mayor and the event, and expressed hope that any controversy provoked would “die down.”

Still set to appear alongside Mamdani is Israeli musician David Broza, while Israeli-American Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie will participate via a livestream from Israel. Broza and Lau-Lavie are both well-known liberals and peace activists, while Rosenfeld is known for performing to religious audiences.

“The Seder is about asking urgent questions — about freedom, responsibility, and how we care for one another,” said Dorf in the initial press release announcing the event. “Each year, we bring together voices who challenge, inspire, and reflect the world as it is — and as it could be.”

Dorf, who previously hosted then-candidate Mamdani for a Yom Kippur event last year, has criticized IDF policy in Gaza — but has rejected allegations that Israel has committed “genocide,” a claim the mayor makes frequently. 

Net proceeds from the already sold-out tickets will go toward Seeds of Peace, an organization known for hosting Israel and Arab youth at dialogue forums in Maine, the press release said.

Other celebrities on the bill include Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner, news anchor Don Lemon, musician Meg Okura and comedienne Olga Namer.

Janeese Lewis George, a Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., met with prominent local rabbis and Jewish community leaders last week amid fallout over a DSA questionnaire she filled out outlining her views on Israel and antisemitism.

The March 19 meeting, at the Orthodox Ohev Sholom Congregation in Shepherd Park, was arranged after her responses to a DSA endorsement questionnaire were made public last month, according to two sources familiar with the meeting. 

In the questionnaire, Lewis George pledged not to attend events focused on “promoting Zionism and apartheid.” She also said that she had attended a D.C. Jewish Community Relations Council event in December only to talk about opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation measures in the region, and that she did not agree with JCRC’s stances on Israel, Zionism and antisemitism. 

At the meeting at Ohev Sholom, Lewis George apologized for her statements in the questionnaire, one of the event’s attendees told Jewish Insider, and cried when someone in the meeting described feeling hurt by her answers in the questionnaire. 

She blamed the anti-Israel responses on one of her staff members, and said she would have submitted a different response if she had seen it before it was submitted. 

However, she has not expressed that same sentiment publicly. A spokesperson for Lewis George did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Monday. 

Lewis George did not make any promises to apologize publicly or to further address her comments in the DSA questionnaire, according to the meeting attendee. 

The meeting included rabbis and senior leaders from Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School, the Edlavitch D.C. JCC, Temple Sinai, Ohev Sholom, Adas Israel Congregation, Tifereth Israel Congregation, the JCRC and Tzedek DC, a legal services organization. 

Lewis George will appear at a rally hosted by the Metro DC DSA chapter on Wednesday alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), one of the most vocal detractors of Israel in Congress.

Ron Halber, the CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, wrote in an op-ed published Monday that Metro DC DSA threatens “the sense of attachment and belonging that we [Jews] have long enjoyed in D.C.”

“Their questionnaire for political candidates encourages the systematic erasure of Jewish and pro-Israel Americans from public life. It is an outrageous and revolting display of religious discrimination,” Halber wrote in Washington Jewish Week. He did not specifically mention Lewis George.

Correction: A previous version of this article identified Temple Micah as one of the participants in the meeting. They did not have a representative in the room.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday condemned online commentary from a prominent Palestinian writer and activist who labeled Jewish people “parasites” and “demons” whose book Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, provided an illustration for.

The mayor’s comments came a day after the Washington Free Beacon reported that Duwaji had supplied artwork for an essay by prominent author Susan Abulhawa in the collection Every Moment is a Life, a book Abulhawa also compiled. The outlet also found various tweets in which Abulhawa railed against Israelis and Jewish people more broadly, using terms such as “Jewish supremacist vampires,” “rootless soulless ghouls,” and “dual loyalty Zionists.”

In one post, Abulhawa quoted another X user who asked, ”is everyone Jewish or married to a Jew in the U.S. government?” to add her own antisemitic commentary.

“the whole world is zionist occupied, except Palestine. They’ve stolen our land and home and heritage, but we’ve at least kept our dignity, refusing to submit to these parasites on earth,” she wrote.

In his remarks on Friday, Mamdani asserted that his wife had “never engaged with nor met” Abulhawa, and received the contract work for the illustration via a third party. 

“I think that that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible,” the mayor said.

The mayor also again stressed that his wife “doesn’t have a role” in his administration, though in a January interview he called her the “best advocate” for influencing his policy decisions. 

Jewish Insider previously reported that Duwaji had liked multiple online posts expressly supporting the Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

Abulhawa subsequently posted on social media that she had received “outpouring of support following Mamdani’s unfortunate capitulation to zionist power.”

“Let’s keep our focus on the crimes and victims of Jewish supremacist zionist ghouls, vampires, parasites, etc.,” she wrote unrepentantly on X, promising further commentary in the near future.

Two of New York’s largest Jewish community groups voiced consternation Tuesday night over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recent fraternizing with activists who had defended and even advocated violence against Israel.

The criticism from the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and the UJA-Federation of New York came after Mamdani shared a photo on social media Monday night of himself and his wife hosting Columbia University campus activist Mahmoud Khalil at Gracie Mansion — and after reports that Abdullah Akl, the stridently anti-Israel political director of the Muslim American Society of New York, had introduced the mayor at an event in Staten Island. 

JCRC CEO Mark Treyger highlighted federal findings that the protests that Khalil helped lead created a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia. He acknowledged Khalil’s legal fight to avoid deportation, but urged the mayor to also open Gracie Mansion to those subjected to harassment on the Ivy League campus.

“If our democracy affords Mahmoud Khalil due process rights, as it should, then those same democratic principles must also extend to the civil rights of students and staff to study and work in an environment free from hate, intimidation, and harassment. We cannot be selective about whose rights we defend,” Treyger, a former city councilmember, wrote on X. “Their stories deserve to be heard so that no student, in any educational setting, is ever forced to endure hate and intimidation again.”

The UJA-Federation statement noted that Khalil had rationalized the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks as a means of preventing Israeli-Saudi normalization, and that Akl had led a chant in 2024 calling for attacks on Tel Aviv and lauding now-deceased Hamas spokesperson Abu Obeida.

“His decision in the last few days alone to share a stage on Staten Island with an individual who publicly called to ‘strike, strike Tel Aviv,’ and then host an Iftar meal at Gracie Mansion with a man who justified the Oct. 7 atrocities, raises deep concerns in our community,” the UJA-Federation statement said, contrasting the actions with the mayor’s pledges of inclusivity when he entered office. 

“This is an important moment for Mayor Mamdani to live up to his own rhetoric and reaffirm his commitment to confronting antisemitism and keeping every New Yorker safe.”

Akl’s organization had its funding from the City Council frozen earlier this year after it held a craft fair hawking merchandise celebrating Hamas, Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and featuring the slogans “Let’s go bomb Tel Aviv” and “Death to the IDF.”

The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and did not answer questions from Jewish Insider about how his team vets the people he participates in events with.  

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani would not speak to Jewish Insider’s findings that his wife, First Lady Rama Duwaji, had liked Instagram posts that justified and even glorified the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.

The mayor would not directly address JI’s revelations that his wife had liked posts that approvingly shared stills from the livestreamed assault and promoted a protest that supported the terrorist action the following day — a protest Mamdani himself had condemned at the time. 

“My wife is the love of my life, and she’s also a private person who has held no formal position on my campaign or in my City Hall,” Mandani said at a press briefing Friday morning. “I, however, was elected to represent all eight-and-a-half million people in this city, and I believe that it’s my responsibility, because of that role, to answer any questions about my thoughts and my policies and my decisions.”

His comments appear to be an effort to differentiate Duwaji, who has no official municipal or political role, and the wife of Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), whom the New York Times reported earlier this week had liked and shared multiple posts attacking activists critical of Israel while serving as the congressman’s campaign treasurer.

But the mayor’s defense contrasts with his remarks in an interview from January, when he referred to Duwaji as “the best advocate” and credited her with lobbying him to close public schools for a snow day after a student reached her by email. 

Duwaji, who met Mamdani on a dating app in 2021 and married him in early 2025, is an increasingly prominent Syrian-American illustrator whose work appeared in a New Yorker piece on conditions in Gaza following her husband’s election last fall, and whose style and presence in high society has received widespread attention.

A post that Duwaji liked from the day of the attack — which saw nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign workers killed, thousands wounded, 251 civilians and military personnel kidnapped and numerous episodes of sexual assault — labeled images of attackers breaching the barrier between Israel and Gaza and riding in a captured Israeli Defense Forces vehicle as “Systemic change for collective liberation” and valorized the bloody onslaught as “resistance.”

Another post, from the controversial Times Square protest the day after, includes a clip of a crowd chanting “Every colonized people, every occupied people has the right to self-defense” and features images of signs and banners declaring “WHEN PEOPLE ARE OCCUPIED, RESISTANCE IS JUSTIFIED” and “RESISTANCE AGAINST OCCUPATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT.” 

The post is from the account of the pro-China, pro-Russia, pro-Iran nonprofit the People’s Forum, which organized the demonstration with the Democratic Socialists of America and other far-left groups. The caption explicitly declares the purpose of the day-after rally as “to stand with Palestinian resistance.”

As of Friday afternoon, Duwaji’s likes of these posts remain visible to her followers.

Mamdani, previously a state assemblyman known for his outspoken criticism of Israel, was at pains during the mayoral campaign to condemn the Hamas attacks. He today represents the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel.

“Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7th was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally,” a City Hall spokesperson said in a statement to JI on Thursday.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spent the mayoral campaign distancing himself from the most radical anti-Israel elements of his leftist movement, but an examination of his wife’s social media activity reveals she liked multiple Instagram posts cheering on Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault.

The posts liked by Rama Duwaji, a Syrian-American artist, unambiguously celebrated the terrorist attack, which saw nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign workers killed, thousands wounded, 251 civilians and military personnel kidnapped and numerous episodes of sexual assault.

The first post, shared on the day of Hamas’ onslaught, came from The Slow Factory, which bills itself as “a school, knowledge partner and climate innovation organization” that “center[s] the voices and ideas of the Global Majority (Black, Indigenous, and other people of color) to share their knowledge outside the boundaries of institutions & oppressive systems.”

The Instagram post shows stills from participants’ livestreamed footage of the attack: first of a bulldozer that terrorists used to breach the barrier separating Israel from Gaza, the second of attackers riding on a captured IDF vehicle. Printed on the former are the words “Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation,” and on the latter “Resisting apartheid since 1948,” and on both the slogan “Systemic change for collective liberation.”

The extensive caption on the post laments that “if and when the occupation forces retaliate against this resistance” Gazans will be “punished for wanting freedom from apartheid.”

Duwaji, who met Mamdani on a dating app in 2021 and married him in early 2025, liked this post and others using a personal account in her own name, on which she has posted her often-political illustrations and with which the mayor has interacted in the past. She has used it also to directly criticize Israeli policy.

The unapologetic tone of the Slow Factory Post contrasts radically with the mayor’s debate-stage messaging on the attack, which characterized Hamas’ actions as “war crimes,” even as he continually lambasted the Israeli military response.

Duwaji did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the mayor’s office would not answer questions regarding his feelings about her online activity, or whether they had discussed the Oct. 7 attacks at the time. Rather, his team repeated his standard line on the bloody terrorist rampage.

“Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7th was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally,” a City Hall spokesperson said in a statement to Jewish Insider.

It is unclear when Duwaji liked the Slow Factory post, or the materials that the People’s Forum — part of Shanghai-based Maoist tech mogul Neville “Roy” Singham’s network of nonprofits promoting pro-China, pro-Russia and pro-Iran propaganda — posted to Instagram on Oct. 8, 2023. Duwaji, again using her personal account, liked two posts from protests the organization led alongside the Democratic Socialists of America and allied organizations in Times Square one day after the attack on Israel.

Mamdani, then a state assemblymember, publicly criticized the rally at the time for “making light” of Hamas’ massacre of civilians. 

But the posts his then-girlfriend approved of on Instagram enthusiastically justify both the rally and the terrorist actions. 

Both captions feature the slogan “from the river to the sea” — often understood as calling for the total elimination of Israel from the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — and one includes a clip of the crowd chanting, call-and-response style: “Every colonized people, every occupied people has the right to self-defense.”

The images in that post show signs and banners declaring “WHEN PEOPLE ARE OCCUPIED, RESISTANCE IS JUSTIFIED” and “RESISTANCE AGAINST OCCUPATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT.”

“Thousands have taken to the streets in #NYC to stand with Palestinian resistance and call for an end to all U.S. aid to apartheid Israel,” the caption on the post reads.

JI’s findings come amid a growing focus on political spouses: earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the wife of Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) had liked or shared numerous controversial posts, including some attacking activists critical of Israel.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani slammed joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran in a statement Saturday — without placing fault with Tehran in his reaction. 

Mamdani released a statement that reiterated his police department’s earlier pledge to boost local security, and also attacked Israel and the United States for “an illegal war of aggression.” But unlike other Democrats who have spoken out against the air campaign, he mentioned neither the atrocities committed by the Iranian regime against its own citizens, nor President Donald Trump, with whom he met just days ago.

“Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war,” he wrote. “Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace.”

The NYPD declared Saturday morning it was “closely monitoring” the situation in the Middle East and working with federal and international law enforcement. It further promised pre-emptive steps to increase security at potential targets, though it did not indicate whether it was aware of any specific threat.

“As is our protocol and out of an abundance of caution, we will be enhancing patrols to sensitive locations throughout the city, including diplomatic, cultural, religious, and other relevant sites,” the department tweeted.

The NYPD did not respond to queries about specific actions, but videos on social media showed members of the department’s Counter-Terrorism Task Force at Manhattan’s iconic Temple Emanu-El as well as outside the Iranian consulate. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul similarly vowed that she would deploy state troopers to guard vulnerable sites, even as she said “there were no specific, credible threats to New York.” She noted the impending start of Purim Monday night as cause to coordinate with the leaders of the Jewish community.

“State Police are increasing their presence at religious, diplomatic, and cultural sites statewide in coordination with federal, state, and local law enforcement partners,” the Democrat wrote in a statement. “Additionally, in advance of the Jewish holiday of Purim, State Police remain alert and have already begun outreach to religious organizations to offer support.”

Meanwhile, organizations affiliated with China-based left-wing tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham — known for promoting geopolitical narratives favorable to Beijing and its allies in Moscow and Tehran — including the People’s Forum and CODE PINK kicked off a protest against the strikes in Times Square on Saturday  afternoon.

Joining them, according to promotional materials, are the Democratic Socialists of America, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and the National Iranian American Council, known as the country’s de facto lobbying group in the United States.

Evanston, Ill., Mayor Daniel Biss, a Democratic congressional candidate, on Monday defended his decision in 2024 to withhold police support requested by Northwestern University to clear an anti-Israel encampment on the school’s campus.

The lack of police support, according to internal communications released by the House Education and Workforce Committee last month as part of an inquiry to Biss, forced the university to reach an agreement with the encampment, lacking the necessary law enforcement personnel to disperse and arrest the encampment members. 

Jewish community members said the deal rewarded antisemitic behavior.

Biss, who is running for Congress in Illinois’ 11th Congressional District, asserted that the Evanston police department did not determine that the encampment posed a threat to students or the community, and that police officials had been concerned that forcibly clearing the encampment would worsen the situation.

“I did not, and would not, direct the Evanston Police Department to disperse a protest or arrest protesters against the advice of department leadership,” Biss wrote in a letter to Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), the chairman of the committee, on Monday. “Doing so would unnecessarily endanger officers, improperly suppress constitutionally protected speech, and substitute political judgement for the expertise of public safety professionals.”

Facing a federal investigation, Northwestern agreed to pay the Trump administration $75 million and cancel the agreement with the encampment participants.

Walberg also accused Biss of publicizing his refusal to provide police support as a means of burnishing his progressive political credentials. In his response letter, Biss denied this.

“Antisemitism is a dangerous and growing problem in our country and around the world, and one that I have taken seriously throughout my career,” Biss wrote. “In addition to its voluminous inquiries into universities, businesses, local municipalities, and other entities, I encourage the committee to also examine the rise of antisemitic rhetoric originating from within the federal government,” he continued, pointing to reported antisemitic comments by Customs and Border Protection Commander Gregory Bovino

Biss said he would provide a briefing to the committee, as requested by Walberg, on his decisions surrounding the Northwestern encampment, at a time to be determined.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his team refused to condemn social media posts from the co-founder of the group ‘Hot Girls for Zohran’ that boosted antisemitic and pro-Iran voices and bashed police and leading U.S. politicians.

The refusal came one day after Jewish Insider revealed Kaif Gilani — a finance professional who spearheaded a social media, merchandising and volunteer canvassing operation  supporting the mayor’s election last year — had shared conspiracy theories from a Holocaust revisionist and a video cheerleading ex-Hamas military chief and Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar, along with posts insulting law enforcement and various political figures. 

From City Hall on Thursday, Mamdani would only stress that Gilani’s organization operated independently of his official election effort.

Asked by a reporter about his association with Gilani, Mamdani said, “This was an individual leading an outside group and was never paid for by our campaign. If New Yorkers want to know my views then they can hear it directly from me.”

When JI pressed the mayor directly whether he condemned the content of Gilani’s posts, Mamdani refused to respond and left the room, similar to how he fled questions on the matter from Politico on Wednesday. His press secretary maintained he had answered the question. 

Mamdani spokeswoman Dora Pekec acknowledged that the mayor had posed for photos with Gilani, but would not say anything about his view of the activist’s promotion of conspiracy theories of Israeli involvement in 9/11 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, as well as the amplification of explicit pro-Iran and pro-Hamas messaging, or of posts asserting that “all cops are going to hell” and “there’s no such thing as a good cop.”

“As the mayor says, if you want to know what he thinks, you can hear it from him,” Pekec said.

The mayor also did not answer a question from another reporter of whether he knew Gilani or had given him a referral to the campaign of former City Comptroller Brad Lander, whose congressional bid Mamdani has endorsed. 

JI discovered that Gilani, through a company he formed in November, had been the highest-paid consultant to Lander’s congressional campaign — though Lander, a self-described progressive Zionist and outspoken Israel critic, insisted through a spokesperson that his team had been unaware of Gilani’s posts and terminated his contract after JI shared its findings.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani selected Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of the progressive Zionist group New York Jewish Agenda and a critic of yeshiva education, to helm the city’s Office to Combat Antisemitism.

Jewish Insider first reported in January that the administration was considering Wisdom for the job. But a source also told JI earlier this week that her past work as director of development and government affairs at Young Advocates for Fair Education (Yaffed) — which criticizes the quality of secular education in Hasidic schools — had initially given the mayor’s team some pause. Mamdani had sought the support of the Satmar Hasidic community during his campaign.

In her conversation with JI last month, Wisdom sketched what she described as a “comprehensive strategy” that the office, which former Mayor Eric Adams established in May 2025, could pursue.

The antisemitism office could be “coordinating between long-standing offices and agencies tasked with combating hate, and input from the diversity of New York’s Jewish community,” she said, outlining broad steps.

In her public commentary, Wisdom has criticized some extremist rhetoric and actions — such as the anti-Israel protest in Times Square the day following the Oct. 7 attacks, the slogan “from the river to the sea” and boycotts of people labeled “Zionists” — but also defended critics of Israel and opponents of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

A range of Jewish Democratic politicians and advocates, including top staffers from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office and the City Council, lauded Wisdom’s selection.

“Her Jewish values, tireless commitment to justice, and strong relationships & credibility across the community are precisely what we need in this role. Jewish safety is inextricable from everyone’s safety and our democracy,” said Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the progressive Jewish Council for Public Affairs and a New York Jewish Agenda board member.

However, some leaders in the Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities privately bristled at Wisdom’s history at Yaffed, though several hesitated to speak publicly out of a reluctance to pick what they described as an unnecessary fight with the mayor’s office.

“Orthodox Jews are among those most frequently targeted by antisemitism and discrimination. Choosing a figure known for antagonizing the Orthodox community — someone who has publicly battled yeshivas — reflects a troubling disconnect from that reality, and from the promises Mayor Mamdani has repeatedly made to protect our community,” said one leader. . “At best, it is a deeply misguided decision. At worst, it is counterproductive and offensive.”

Some leaders based outside the five boroughs were more outspoken, particularly about Wisdom’s willingness to countenance anti-Zionist rhetoric and questioning of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

“Saying anti-Zionism is not antisemitism does not reflect the reality of the overwhelming majority of Jewish New Yorkers,” said Rabbi Marc Schneier, founder of the Hampton Synagogue. “Eighty-one years after the liberation of Auschwitz, honoring the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust demands vigilance, moral clarity and the courage to speak out against those who choose to define and reformulate the definition of antisemitism in our day.”

Wisdom, whose official appointment was first reported in the Forward, will replace Adams’ executive director of the office, Moshe Davis. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America are set on contesting congressional turf home to one of the city’s biggest Hasidic Jewish communities — setting up a battle royale in the 7th Congressional District that could either blunt Mamdani’s brand of socialist politics, or bolster the new mayor and his far-left supporters.

Mamdani was only days into his term when he endorsed New York state Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who, like Mamdani, is a DSA member, to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), whose district delivered Mamdani’s strongest primary margins last year and contains most of the so-called “commie corridor”: a chain of trendy, gentrifying Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods where socialist support runs strong. 

Velázquez, meanwhile, has backed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso to be her successor, and some community and labor organizations have aligned behind him, pitting Mamdani’s hard-left bloc against the older progressive establishment.

Mamdani has so far been cautious in spending his political capital on behalf of DSA allies. Even before entering City Hall, Mamdani scuttled a left-flank challenge to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and persuaded a DSA-aligned city councilwoman to drop her bid against Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) to consolidate a left-wing lane for former city Comptroller Brad Lander. 

Democratic observers who spoke to Jewish Insider were split over whether Mamdani is steering DSA or DSA is steering the mayor.  

But Mamdani has now put his name and credibility on the line in this race, argued veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf.

“He’s not a mayor. He’s a movement,” Sheinkopf said. “If he beats [Velázquez’s candidate], he gets more powerful than he’s ever been. As long as you’re winning, people are afraid of you. You start losing, the fear is no longer there and it makes him less significant.”

Not long ago, Velázquez and Reynoso themselves were considered the left wing of the party, defying the once-feared power of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, helping to build a coalition of idealistic new arrivals, community groups, unions and longtime political reform organizations that became the dominant force in the borough’s politics. But the political struggles of the last 20 years are long forgotten, and with the rise of DSA and Mamdani, the residents of what local political observers have humorously tagged the “commie corridor” are no longer content to be one factor among many — or to accept compromise candidates — in their demographic heartland.

“Progressive’s not good enough any more. If you aren’t part of the DSA, that isn’t enough,” said Marcos Masri, a political consultant and native of the district. “They are hungry, they want to hold the reins.”

Valdez’s career path is stereotypical for a DSA member. The daughter of an engineer from Texas, she studied sculpture at the prestigious School of the Art Institute in Chicago before arriving in New York for a job at a Queens-based museum. She then took a role in the visual arts department at Columbia University, and pivoted from creative pursuits to politics when an organizer recruited her to a bargaining unit for the United Auto Workers — itself amid a pivot in New York from its old base of industrial employees and dealership mechanics to radicalized grad students and administrative workers. 

At Local 2110, Valdez signed an open letter just weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks that blasted the American labor movement for its historic support of Israel, and demanded the UAW as a whole embrace the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. The letter makes no reference to the Hamas massacre in Israel that incited the latest phase of conflict.

“Workers in the U.S. are struggling against many of the same capitalist forces that maintain and bolster the Israeli occupation of Palestine. These forces rely on racialized exploitation, dispossession, and policing in the United States and around the world,” reads the missive, which makes no mention of Hamas or the then-fresh terror attacks. “A global class of workers will not achieve liberation if fragmented by colonization, apartheid, and borders. These are the structures on which an ascendant global fascist movement is shoring up white supremacy, nativism, militarism, heteropatriarchy, and other tools of oppression to further divide us.”

The epistle ends with the sign-off “Until Liberation and Return.” A little over a year later, Valdez won election as a DSA-backed insurgent to the New York state Assembly, where she co-sponsored Mamdani’s “Not on our dime!: Ending New York funding of Israeli settler violence act.” This legislation would forbid nonprofit organizations in New York from “unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity,” including in Jerusalem, and establish both monetary penalties as well as a basis for individual lawsuits for damages.

Reynoso, born in Brooklyn to Dominican immigrant parents, has followed a more traditional political career path. He served as an organizer for the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), before he joined the staff of City Councilwoman Diana Reyna. He succeeded Reyna in the City Council in 2013, part of a progressive wave that also lifted Bill de Blasio to the mayoralty, and participated in a council trip to Israel in 2015 over the protests of some activists. He won the largely symbolic borough president’s office in 2021. 

A Valdez victory would enhance both DSA and Mamdani’s reach and prestige, said Sheinkopf, as well as give the mayor “a wedge” against the more pragmatic Jeffries in the House. If Reynoso wins the seat, Masri said it would show the mayor and his socialist cadres still depend on other, older institutional actors to win and exercise power, and their clout — and ability to pressure elected officials leftward — would diminish.

But the race promises to be a test, too, for the district’s large Hasidic Jewish community, the bulk of whom belong to the Satmar movement. Despite their religious objections to Zionism and strong network of social service networks that rely on city funding — and despite a few of their rabbis’ receptiveness toward Mamdani — sources predicted the group’s leaders would largely endorse Reynoso. The borough president, who had an at-times fraught relationship with Satmar leadership in the City Council, has heavily networked within the community in his current role. 

But Masri questioned whether the community’s mobilization would match the inevitable DSA get-out-the-vote campaign, which will draw on a city-spanning web of activists to knock doors for Valdez.

Further complicating the picture is the recent entry of another Democrat, Councilwoman Julie Won, into the contest. Won, who filed paperwork to run on Monday, has little institutional support, but could scrape off more centrist or right-leaning voters who might otherwise support Reynoso.

“If it’s a very close race, and she pulls like 2,000 votes, that is something that can decide the race,” Masri said.

Sheinkopf was more bullish on Reynoso’s prospects, noting the political organization and trust Velázquez, his backer, built during her 16 terms in Congress. He argued Mamdani risks alienating potential progressive allies loyal to the borough president and congresswoman as he seeks to expand his socialist domain.

“He believes he is immune from any blowback,” the strategist said. “This is not a credit card with unending credit. At some point the credit runs out. The shine runs out. You can’t do this forever.”

As Boca Raton, Fla., Mayor Scott Singer aims to unseat pro-Israel stalwart Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), the Republican is hoping that the region’s conservative shifts will help propel him to victory.

Singer told Jewish Insider last week he’s running for Congress because he “love[s] public service” and he sees the country at a “critical point … where we can go back to the failed policies of four years ago or continue to advance the gains that President Trump has made,” and he wants to help push Trump’s agenda forward. That includes Trump’s Middle East policy, which Singer lauded.

Singer, who is running in a traditionally Democratic district, emphasized his three-decade history of public service in the region, and said that he’s “seen a renewed enthusiasm and resurgence in terms of conservative, common sense policies,” particularly among Jewish voters, “as the Democratic Party has grown more and more left.”

“We’re seeing the Republican Party under President Trump becoming the party that really represents more of the issues that a lot of Jewish voters tend to care about,” Singer argued.

He also noted that the district, Florida’s 23rd, has seen a growth in conservative voters coming from out of state, many from states or cities led by Democrats. Trump came within two points of carrying the district in 2024, losing to former Vice President Kamala Harris, 50-48%. That was one of the bigger political shifts in the country, given that in 2020, Trump lost the district to Joe Biden by 13 points.Meanwhile, Moskowitz won his reelection bid 52%-48%.”

Whether Moskowitz and Singer actually end up facing each other in November remains somewhat of an open question, however, pending the outcome of Florida’s upcoming redistricting process.

Singer told JI that his alignment with the GOP has been shaped by his Jewish faith.

“Judaism places a value on individual rights and opportunity, responsibilities, education and freedom,” Singer said. “For hundreds of years, Jewish people were often excluded from Western society and had to make their way — often, as entrepreneurs or self employed, as generations of my family have been — finding ways for them to advance through society.”

“The promise of America is so great because anyone can come here and achieve great things,” he continued. “I’ve always leaned toward the right, because I found that this was a party that valued people’s individual opportunities, merits and contributions, and a natural home that’s consistent with the values that inform my faith.”

Singer argued that Trump has been the strongest advocate and champion of the U.S.-Israel relationship of any U.S. president and a “strong voice against antisemitism, and people are realizing this,” leading to shifts among Jewish voters toward the GOP.

He said that he “personally and spiritually [has] deep connections to the State of Israel and our ancestral home.” And he said that a continued strong U.S.-Israel relationship serves both countries’ interests.

“Israel has been taking a leading edge, fighting terror and fighting enemies who want to see the destruction of Western culture, Western values and the United States,” Singer said.

“What concerns me is in the Democratic Party — and I think it’s concerning a lot of voters, including historic Democratic voters and mainstream voters — is the outrageous and moral failings of Democratic leadership to to confront or contradict claims of genocide when Israel was brutally attacked by terrible terrorists who created committed horrific crimes against women and children — murdering, raping, strangling, kidnapping and torturing,” Singer continued, referencing the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks.

He downplayed anti-Israel trends among some on the right as “a few fringe commentators who seem to have lost semblance of what it means to be a conservative and do not represent the conservative movement.”

Singer emphasized that those voices are out of step with Trump.

“What concerns me is in the Democratic Party — and I think it’s concerning a lot of voters, including historic Democratic voters and mainstream voters — is the outrageous and moral failings of Democratic leadership to to confront or contradict claims of genocide when Israel was brutally attacked by terrible terrorists who created committed horrific crimes against women and children — murdering, raping, strangling, kidnapping and torturing,” Singer continued, referencing the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks.

Asked how he’d describe Moskowitz’s own record on these issues — the two-term Democratic lawmaker has been vocally supportive of Israel and has broken with many in his party on the issue — Singer offered little direct criticism for Moskowitz, instead arguing that he has limited power against what Singer described as a dominant anti-Israel current in the Democratic Party.

“You have to go back to the party and where you are,” Singer said. “When you’re a junior congressman and beholden to some of the increasingly hostile attitude of the Democratic Party and Democratic leadership, including statements by leaders in the House of Representatives that call Israel’s self defense a genocide. When they’re running the party, it’s very hard for any junior member to really stand out and make an effective difference in policy.”

Moskowitz responded in a statement to JI, “I guess the people who are trying to assassinate me over my support for Israel — they obviously think I’m pretty effective,” adding, “By [Singer’s] own logic, I guess there’s no reason for him to run for Congress because he won’t be able to help the district, because he’ll be a freshman.”

Moskowitz has stood apart from most Democrats on various issues relating to Israel, including voting for a controversial bill providing aid to Israel while cutting funding for the Internal Revenue Service, voting to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric, voting to override President Joe Biden’s holds on certain arms sales to Israel and calling for stronger action by the Biden administration on a range of areas related to Israel policy, Iran and antisemitism.

The Democratic congressman has regularly crossed party lines to cosponsor legislation to support Israel and combat Iran with Republican colleagues.

Moskowitz is also facing a progressive primary challenger who has focused significantly on attacking his support for Israel.

Singer said that the U.S.’ current focus, when it comes to Israel, should be disarming and removing Hamas from Gaza. He expressed support for the Trump administration-led ceasefire plan, and said it’s “too hard to speculate” what might come after that, including whether the U.S. should support a two-state solution.

Singer said that, as a member of Congress, he would be vocal against antisemitism, and said that “Congress needs to codify gains that are coming from the Trump executive orders and reevaluate its approach to universities and other institutions at all levels of education” due to what he said was their failure to protect Jewish students’ civil rights.

“There’s still a constant and present danger to people who love freedom, the Israeli people, and also the people who’ve been oppressed by 20 years of a brutal regime,” Singer said.

He praised Trump’s “bold and necessary action” to strike Iran’s nuclear program last June, and said that the U.S. needs to “stand strong” against the Iranian regime amid its violent crackdown on protesters.

“What we’ve seen over the last few weeks with the terrible slaughter — the extent of which we don’t quite fully know because of blackouts — of people longing for peace may hopefully send a signal of an end to this harmful regime,” Singer continued. “We need to continue to work through our diplomatic, economic and military channels to ensure the safety of our nation, the safety of allies, and hopefully bring relief to people in various lands who’ve been threatened by this rogue regime.”

Singer said that, as a member of Congress, he would be vocal against antisemitism, and said that “Congress needs to codify gains that are coming from the Trump executive orders and reevaluate its approach to universities and other institutions at all levels of education” due to what he said was their failure to protect Jewish students’ civil rights.

He said he would be open to bills to “increase standards” for schools receiving federal funding and to revoke funds to ensure that students’ rights are protected.

He said that Congress also “needs to continue to work in terms of fighting antisemitism, in terms of definitions, training, support for institutions — at the state level, we have strong support for religious schools — and ensuring religious freedom for all people.”

Singer said Congress should consider enhancing protections, such as the FACE Act, for religious institutions to allow people to worship freely and without fear, if necessary.

Singer argued that voices in the GOP that have been attempting to mainstream antisemitic ideology are confined to the “fringe,” emphasizing that he sees the issues as more within the mainstream in the Democratic Party.

“There are fringe voices who seem to have lost the thread of the conservative movement and even in some cases, the pro-America movement, by their unfounded criticisms,” Singer said. “And these loud voices should [continue] to be disregarded. Good speech drives out bad speech, and we need to continue to stand strong on all sides of the political spectrum.”

Evanston, Ill., Mayor Daniel Biss, who has expressed support for cutting off some military aid to Israel during his campaign for Congress in the Chicago suburbs, had expressed support for continued aid to Israel earlier in the campaign, according to a position paper Biss himself released Friday.

Biss released the position paper amid scrutiny of his relationship with and outreach to AIPAC and the group’s supporters in the Chicago area. Sources told Jewish Insider that Biss had sought out AIPAC’s support prior to formally launching his campaign, which Biss has repeatedly denied. Evanston Now, a local outlet, reported Friday that Biss had submitted a policy paper to AIPAC early in the campaign and communicated at multiple points with its representatives.

Evanston Now reported that, days after outreach from AIPAC to Biss in the late summer, he came out in support of a series of more hardline anti-Israel positions, including blocking offensive weapons.

Responding to the reports, Biss said Friday that he had met with local AIPAC representatives to lay out his positions, but that he does not share AIPAC’s views and met with the group in the interest of open communication and in hopes “they might decide not to direct [their] MAGA donors to support [his primary opponent, state Sen.] Laura Fine. Perhaps naively, I wanted to show them that, while we disagree on Israel and Palestine, I have family in Israel who I care about deeply, that I take the issue of antisemitism seriously, and that I can engage respectfully with people who have views that are very different from my own.”

Biss said that AIPAC had indicated it wanted to support him “if I was willing to parrot their views.” He went on to share what he said was the text of a position paper he had provided to AIPAC — which included views that do not diverge significantly from those of other AIPAC-backed candidates.

Most notably, the paper stated that Biss supports continued aid to Israel under the terms of the current U.S.-Israel memorandum of understanding, and that he would support another MOU in the future.

“Daniel recognizes the importance of the safety and security of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel. As Israel’s closest friend and ally, the United States must always be committed to providing for Israel’s defense,” the paper reads. “As a member of Congress, Daniel will support continued aid to Israel in accordance with the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, and looks forward to seeing a renewed, expanded Memorandum of Understanding in the coming years.”

The paper also notes, “Daniel believes all military aid to every nation must be compliant with U.S. law.”

Biss now supports efforts to impose an offensive weapons ban on Israel — a direct contradiction to the MOU — and the Block the Bombs Act, which critics characterize as effectively an arms embargo on Israel for many key systems.

In the paper, Biss also called for expanding funding for the Iron Dome missile-defense system and condemned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, stating that he would continue to oppose it in Congress, “while also opposing efforts to criminalize free speech or political activity.”

He also called for a long-term “transition to fully autonomous Palestinian governance once agreed upon conditions are met.”

Biss now supports preemptive American recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Biss offers support in the paper for the United Nations and other existing humanitarian mechanisms in Gaza — though he does not specifically mention the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Though AIPAC has been critical of UNRWA, it has endorsed lawmakers who have supported the agency’s continued work.

“Daniel will also advocate for U.S. humanitarian assistance, delivered in partnership with civil society, established NGOs, and the United Nations to address the needs of the Palestinian people,” the paper reads.

In the paper, Biss also calls for diplomatic efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program, making no mention of support for military action or other means to do so. AIPAC opposed the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, though the group has endorsed and supported many Democratic lawmakers who voted for that deal.

A city council meeting in Richmond, Calif., ended with shouting and frustration after 11 p.m. on Tuesday evening when the body adjourned without considering a measure seeking to censure Mayor Eduardo Martinez, who is under fire from the local Jewish community after sharing antisemitic posts on his LinkedIn page last month. 

“This is a complete embarrassment as a city council,” Councilmember Jamelia Brown, one of the officials who sought to issue a formal censure of Martinez, said before walking away from the meeting room. “We will stand in solidarity and say that this was antisemitic conduct and behavior, yet we don’t want to formalize it and put it on record. It’s very coward [sic] behavior.”

Tuesday’s meeting was the first since Martinez shared multiple incendiary posts regarding the terrorist attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach, Australia, last month. He shared one post referring to the shooting as “Israel’s false flag attack.” Another post called the public celebration of Hanukkah “deeply provocative and very un-Jewish” and said it was meant to intimidate Muslims.

He has since fended off calls to resign from the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council and several dozen local elected officials from nearby cities and towns.  

Martinez offered an apology at the start of the meeting, though he began with a jab at “people who are not ready to accept an apology.” 

“I failed to meet the responsibility that my position requires. I reposted content online that included antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, which have long been used to dehumanize Jewish people and justify violence against them. I was wrong to share them,” Martinez said. 

He offered another apology to “people who felt they had to choose between taking concerns of antisemitism seriously or continuing to support me and the larger vision of justice that we strive toward.”

“I regret that I compromised the integrity of the Palestinian solidarity movement here in Richmond,” Martinez said. “We must be clear that we will not allow antisemitism in our movements, nor will we allow antisemitism to be weaponized against progressive causes.”

The antisemitic rhetoric has struck a nerve with the city’s small Jewish community and Bay Area Jewish activists, givenMartinez’s history of sharing anti-Israel content. Richmond, a San Francisco suburb home to 115,000 people, was the first city in the country to adopt a resolution calling for a ceasefire after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel, doing so weeks after the attacks. 

“We’re still angry. His apology did not feel genuine. It was sort of like a ‘sorry that my opponents are coming after me’ kind of apology, and so we’re maintaining the position that he should step down,” JCRC CEO Tyler Gregory told Jewish Insider on Thursday. 

The Richmond City Council voted to adopt a measure to begin a “restorative process” between the mayor and the city’s Jewish community, with Martinez undergoing antisemitism training and meeting at least twice with Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller, the rabbi at Temple Beth Hillel in Richmond. Martinez said he met with Saxe-Taller and local Chabad Rabbi Yitzchok Wagner in recent days. 

“I appreciate our beginning a much-needed process to address antisemitism and to address the way it’s being increasingly and more baldly used to target Jews as well as to justify attacks on other vulnerable communities,” Saxe-Taller said in brief remarks at the council meeting. “The mayor and leadership of Temple Beth Hillel and others have begun a process of repair with the goal of making Richmond less vulnerable to antisemitism and therefore also to racism and division.”

Wagner and Martinez met for about two hours last week, Wagner told JI. He declined to speak publicly about the content of their meeting, but noted that frustration remains within the Jewish community.

“I think there is a large group that basically says, ‘Well, we have to do our part and just try to work with him. At the same time, the apology is not OK,’ and they’re not ready to accept the apology. They don’t feel it was sincere,” Wagner said. 

Attendees at the council meeting held up competing signs as city residents and activists from nearby communities spoke for a minute each. “Censure Mayor Martinez,” one sign read. “It was not just ‘one mistake,’” read another. The mayor’s supporters held signs reading, “Richmond Jews support our mayor” and “People power from Richmond to Palestine.” 

Vice Mayor Cesar Zepeda was one of two councilmembers, along with Brown, who introduced the formal censure resolution. He told JI that his goal was to show his colleagues that there should be consequences for harmful language. 

“What my colleagues might not realize is that by not voting to censure him, they voted to allow future councilmembers to pretty much get a Get Out of Jail Free card if you say bad stuff about our community, whether they’re antisemitic or racist or homophobic, whatever it may be,” Zepeda said. “You can post three or four things online, say a couple of things here and there, and just do a semi-apology, and you’re good to go.” (While the formal censure resolution was tabled, an amendment to a different resolution that would have censured Martinez was voted down.)

Martinez is up for reelection this year, and Gregory said the JCRC’s affiliated political arm is considering whether to support an opponent to the mayor.

“We’re looking carefully at the mayoral race and seeing if there might be an alternative that’s going to be less of a bomb thrower and less, just to be blunt, less antisemitic as mayor,” said Gregory. “We’re still waiting to see how the race shapes up, but there’s a strong possibility that we get involved in trying to see some change there.”

Evanston, Ill., Mayor Daniel Biss, running in the state’s 9th Congressional District on a platform deeply critical of Israel, sought support from AIPAC before he announced his run for Congress last year, Jewish Insider has learned.

One source familiar with multiple candidates’ outreach to pro-Israel political organizations intending to mobilize in the state’s 2026 Democratic primaries told JI that Biss had reached out to AIPAC in the spring of last year, before Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) had announced her retirement, to solicit AIPAC’s support for a prospective congressional bid should Schakowsky retire.

Niles, Ill., Mayor George Alpogianis, who owns a popular neighborhood diner, told JI he began hearing from multiple visitors to the restaurant that Biss had begun putting feelers out to AIPAC about a run around April of last year, weeks before Schakowsky announced her retirement. 

Biss’ campaign denied having sought AIPAC’s support, alleging instead that the group had attempted to recruit him.

“Daniel has been clear that he has neither sought nor would accept AIPAC’s support in this race, and any suggestion that he ever solicited AIPAC’s backing is categorically false,” a Biss campaign spokesperson said. 

“In the interest of open communication, Daniel met with AIPAC representatives to clearly lay out his positions on Israel, the need for a two-state solution, the humanitarian disaster the Netanyahu government has inflicted on Gaza, combating antisemitism, and related issues. After those conversations, AIPAC moved from attempting to recruit Daniel as their preferred candidate to labeling him a ‘dangerous detractor’ and backing state Sen. Laura Fine.”

AIPAC has not announced any formal endorsement in the race.

“While Daniel will always remain open to dialogue with those who disagree with him, his positions are guided by principle and not political pressure. And unlike other candidates, Daniel does not need the support of AIPAC or other outside special interests to win this race,” the spokesperson continued.

AIPAC declined to comment.

Biss, who is Jewish, has taken positions starkly at odds with those advocated by AIPAC since entering the race, including calling to block all offensive weapons shipments to Israel, supporting the “Block the Bombs Act” and calling for the U.S. to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state.

He also wrote that, while he has deep familial connections to the state of Israel — his mother grew up in Israel, he spent significant time there and he had a cousin who served in the IDF after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks — “other families have stories that paint a dramatically different picture. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was itself a violent trauma for Palestinians. And I have also spent time in the West Bank, decades ago, witnessing first-hand the cruelty of the occupation — and the way, already then, that it warped Israeli attitudes.”

Biss additionally opposed Israeli and American strikes on Iran’s nuclear program during the 12-day war last June.

More recently, Biss signed a joint letter with several of the other candidates in the race alluding to and denouncing reported efforts by AIPAC to convince another candidate to drop out of the race. Opponents allege that AIPAC is quietly backing state Sen. Laura Fine in the race.

“Recent reports and conversations within our communities suggest that organized efforts are underway to pressure a fellow Democratic candidate to withdraw from the race,” the candidates wrote. “While vigorous persuasion and debate are part of politics, coordinated pressure campaigns aimed at forcing candidates out undermine the democratic process and erode trust among voters.”

Other candidates in the race, including influencer Kat Abugazaleh and Bushra Amiwala, an activist and a member of the Skokie Board of Education, have histories of anti-Israel activism and have staked out stances strongly hostile to Israel in the primary.

Biss is not the first Democratic candidate to shift his stance on Israel and AIPAC after failing to receive support from the group. JI reported in November that Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), running for Senate in Massachusetts, also sought AIPAC’s endorsement before launching his campaign with a focus on attacking the pro-Israel group. 

Biss and other Democratic candidates’ changed views on their support of Israel have come as the party base has grown increasingly hostile to the Jewish state in recent years. Under pressure from party activists, earlier this month, California state Sen. Scott Wiener, running to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), called Israel’s conduct of its war against Hamas a “genocide.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sparked an uproar among Jewish community leaders when, on his first day in office, he revoked an executive order that adopted a definition of antisemitism equating some criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish prejudice.

But the mayor has yet to articulate which, if any, definition of antisemitism he will abide by, raising questions about his views toward escalating anti-Jewish hate in the city as he continues to weigh in on high-profile issues affecting the Jewish community.

His recent comments responding to pro-Hamas protesters in Queens last week and an arson attack on a synagogue in Jackson, Miss., over the weekend illustrate what Mamdani’s critics interpret as a core tension animating his assessment of antisemitism.

While Mamdani released a statement on Sunday calling the arson a “violent act of antisemitism,” his comment on the demonstration outside a synagogue in Kew Gardens Hills where protesters openly voiced support for Hamas was delayed and came only after he faced growing pressure from media outlets and Jewish community leaders to denounce the demonstration.

In contrast with several of his top allies on the left, Mamdani, who has long been an outspoken critic of Israel, ultimately chose not to the call the protesters antisemitic, even as he otherwise denounced Hamas as a “terrorist organization” and said that the chants heard at the demonstration “are wrong and have no place in our city.”

The statements on two separate issues in different states helped distill how Mamdani has traditionally reacted to individual instances of antisemitism. He has unequivocally condemned as antisemitic recent incidents where Jews have faced violent attacks and have been targeted by vandalism, among other acts. But the mayor has been slower to react decisively on protests near Jewish institutions involving anti-Israel activism.

Mamdani, who has long identified as anti-Zionist and refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, drew backlash last November after he admonished a Manhattan synagogue that was also targeted by anti-Israel demonstrators who chanted slogans including “death to the IDF” and “globalize the intifada,” a phrase he has declined to renounce.

Even as he distanced himself from the language used by protesters in objecting to an event about immigration to Israel, Mamdani said that “sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law,” a statement he later revised. He did not label the protest antisemitic, as other elected officials had done. On the recent Queens protest outside an Israeli real estate event, Mamdani used similar language when asked why he hadn’t condemned “both sides.” He answered, “I absolutely have an opposition to the sale of land in the West Bank. It’s a violation of international law and that comes from my belief in the importance of following international law.”

His ongoing reluctance to explicitly identify such protests as antisemitic underscores how his record of pro-Palestinian activism has long been central to his self-conception. While he moderated on several key issues in the election, Mamdani notably resisted softening even some of his most controversial views relating to Israel — such as a pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes.

“On an ideological level, it’s a very problematic issue to be a proud anti-Zionist — especially if you are the mayor of New York City,” Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, who leads Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, said. “On a practical level, wherever anti-Zionism has been normalized,” he said, “as night follows day, it leads to antisemitism, in every single case, and it is the case today. There won’t be an exception simply because the mayor, at this time, insists on being an anti-Zionist and is proud of it.”

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, who leads Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, said in an interview with Jewish Insider on Monday that he has spoken with Mamdani repeatedly about what he called a clear connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism — which, he noted, the mayor has not acknowledged.

Even as Hirsch conceded “it’s not necessarily the case in every circumstance” that “anti-Zionism is, ipso facto, antisemitism,” he said such discussions are “completely divorced from reality,” disagreeing with Mamdani’s assessment of the Queens protest last week. “What Jews mean by anti-Zionism is not what Hamas means by anti-Zionism,” he explained. “If you are pro-Hamas, then you are, by definition, an antisemite.”

“On an ideological level, it’s a very problematic issue to be a proud anti-Zionist — especially if you are the mayor of New York City,” Hirsch argued to JI. “On a practical level, wherever anti-Zionism has been normalized,” he said, “as night follows day, it leads to antisemitism, in every single case, and it is the case today. There won’t be an exception simply because the mayor, at this time, insists on being an anti-Zionist and is proud of it.”

The working definition of antisemitism Mamdani rescinded, which is promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, has long been a target of anti-Israel activists and some progressives who believe it stifles legitimate criticism of Israel — even as it is widely accepted as useful guidance by mainstream Jewish groups.

A spokesperson for Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment from JI asking how he would define what he has frequently called “the scourge of antisemitism” while pledging to ensure the safety of Jewish New Yorkers.

Mamdani has yet to announce key administration hires for areas related to antisemitism, such as the office to combat antisemitism, which he has vowed to retain, and he has sent mixed messages regarding his efforts to fight antisemitism — voicing interest, for example, in a city curriculum embraced by leading Jewish groups that promotes a definition of Zionism seemingly at odds with his own views on Israel.

Shortly before his inauguration, Mamdani argued that a report issued by the Anti-Defamation League, which highlighted several members of his transition team who had used antisemitic tropes and justified Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, ignored what he called “the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli government.” He did not address some of the most extreme comments made by appointees, but said the ADL report “draws attention away from the very real crisis of antisemitism we see.”

Mark Goldfeder, the director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, said he suspects that Mamdani is now “gearing up to adopt” what he characterized as “one of the ‘IHRA-lite’ definitions” of antisemitism, citing those embraced by the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Project — which he called “a little better than JDA,” though neither are widely accepted by mainstream Jewish organizations. Both definitions, he argued to JI, “provide more cover to those who wish to hide their antisemitism behind the curtain of anti-Zionism.”

Jonathan Jacoby, the president and national director of the Nexus Project, said in a statement to JI on Monday that Mamdani “and all public officials should be judged by the actions they take to protect Jewish communities — not by their adherence to any one controversial definition of antisemitism.”

According to Goldfeder, applying the Nexus definition to the recent incidents addressed by Mamdani “would mean that attacking Jews at a synagogue,” as in Jackson, “would be antisemitic — but harassing them, as long as no physical attack” took place, as in Queens, “would be fine.”

“I, for one, am not OK with either,” Goldfeder said. “Neither are the federal government, the majority of U.S. states and the vast majority of Americans both Jewish and non-Jewish.”

Jonathan Jacoby, the president and national director of the Nexus Project, said in a statement to JI on Monday that Mamdani “and all public officials should be judged by the actions they take to protect Jewish communities — not by their adherence to any one controversial definition of antisemitism.”

“Mamdani has expressed a clear commitment to engaging a wide range of Jewish voices in the fight against antisemitism and hate, and affirmed that the city will continue to operate an office to combat antisemitism,” Jacoby added. “Instead of getting hung up on fights over definitions like IHRA that were never intended to be enshrined into law, we need to see more security funding for vulnerable institutions, more support for more education about antisemitism and bias, and the enforcement of civil rights laws to prevent actual discrimination and harassment.”

Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said that the “biggest question” for her “is not whether the mayor personally adopts a specific definition but, rather, how he will respond to acts of antisemitism and invest in a comprehensive strategy to counter it.”

Rabbi Marc Schneier, who has spoken privately with Mamdani about issues concerning the Jewish community, said he was “pleasantly surprised” that Mamdani spoke out against the Queens protest and called Hamas a terror group, noting that the mayor had faced scrutiny for not even mentioning Hamas in his initial statement regarding the Oct. 7 attacks.

“We may be witnessing some evolution in terms of his understanding of Israel,” Schneier told JI, while adding that the Jewish community has “a long way to go.”

Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said that the “biggest question” for her “is not whether the mayor personally adopts a specific definition but, rather, how he will respond to acts of antisemitism and invest in a comprehensive strategy to counter it.”

“I’ve appreciated his willingness to engage with our community and evolve his position and I hope that he will continue to do so,” she told JI on Monday. “The pro-Hamas protests in Kew Gardens and the arson attack in Jackson are different examples of the many ways antisemitism is manifesting right now. All of it threatens Jews and our broader society and democracy.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism from Democratic leaders over his delayed and muted response to last week’s pro-Hamas protest in Queens that caused nearby schools and a synagogue to close early in anticipation of the demonstration, where dozens of masked protesters chanted “We support Hamas” near the synagogue. 

Democratic elected officials across New York — including left-wing politicians hostile to Israel, like Mamdani ally and former City Comptroller Brad Lander — were quick to release statements condemning the support for Hamas that was on display at the demonstration, which was organized by the group Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, [PAL]-Awda, to protest an event held by CapitIL, a Jerusalem-based real estate agency. 

The event was held at the Modern Orthodox synagogue Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills. 

A flyer promoting the protest, which took place on a residential street about half a block from the synagogue, called the meeting an “illegal event” promoting “blatant land theft and dispossession.” Keffiyeh-clad demonstrators also chanted “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” “Globalize the intifada,” and “Death to the IDF” for more than two hours while banging on drums. 

“Let’s be crystal clear: this is vile antisemitism,” Lander, who is running to unseat Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) as a Mamdani-endorsed challenger in New York’s 10th Congressional District, said on Friday morning. “This should not have to be said: you can oppose land sales in the West Bank, without supporting terrorism & the mass murder of Jews.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani in the mayoral election, also weighed in on Friday morning, saying, “Hamas is a terrorist organization that calls for the genocide of Jews. No matter your political beliefs, this type of rhetoric is disgusting, it’s dangerous, and it has no place in New York,”  

New York Attorney General Letitia James said Friday midday, “Hamas is a terrorist organization. We do not support terrorists. Period.”

Other New York Democratic leaders who condemned the protest quickly and directly on Thursday and Friday included New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Reps. Grace Meng and Ritchie Torres. 

But the newly inaugurated mayor remained silent Thursday night and much of the following day regarding the demonstration, which marked his first major test in protecting the city’s Jewish community. 

His spokesperson did not respond to multiple inquiries from Jewish Insider on Thursday, including one asking whether the mayor’s team had discouraged demonstrators from protesting and another, immediately after the event, asking if he condemned any of the slogans chanted. 

Mamdani broke his silence late in the afternoon on Friday when he was asked about the protesters’ pro-Hamas chant by Politico reporter Jason Beeferman while leaving a campaign event in Brooklyn for Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed candidate Claire Valdez, who is running for a Brooklyn-Queens congressional seat held by Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) 

“That language is wrong,” Mamdani replied while walking to a car after the event. “I think that language has no place in New York City.”

Mamdani later followed up with an additional statement just after Shabbat started in New York: “As I made clear, the rhetoric and displays that we saw and heard in Kew Gardens Hills last night are wrong and have no place in our city,” he said. “My team is in close touch with the NYPD regarding last night’s protest and counterprotest. We will continue to ensure New Yorkers’ safety entering and exiting houses of worship as well as the constitutional right to protest.”

On Saturday, when asked at a press conference why he didn’t “condemn both sides,” Mamdani answered, “I absolutely have an opposition to the sale of land in the West Bank. It’s a violation of international law and that comes from my belief in the importance of following international law.”  

“It’s been a distressing few months for Jews everywhere. I appreciated the mayor’s statement,” Democratic strategist Chris Coffey told JI. “Could it have come earlier? Sure. But being mayor in the first week is pure pandemonium and chaos. The important part is that he got it right.” 

But Mamdani’s eventual response was met with continued concern from Jewish leaders over its delay and neglect to specifically condemn Hamas. In a sign of the far-left character of his political base, he also received criticism from DSA-aligned allies in his own camp for criticizing the protest. 

“It’s a step up from his statement [after the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks in Israel], which failed to even mention Hamas. Still, it’s concerning that it takes the mayor of the city with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel nearly 24 hours to condemn blatant antisemitism when every other major elected in New York found the time,” Democratic state Assemblymember Sam Berger, who represents the district where the protest took place, told JI on Sunday. 

Another Democratic Queens assemblymember, Nily Rozic, told JI, “It shouldn’t take the mayor [nearly] 24 hours to condemn an antisemitic protest layered in antisemitism, let alone one that openly supports terror organizations.” 

Rozic expressed dismay over the timing of the statement after Shabbat.  

“If the mayor were genuine in his concern over Jewish safety he would have acted with urgency and not waited so long, when most of those impacted wouldn’t see his statement until long after,” she told JI.  

“I am a vocal & passionate support[er] of Mamdani’s,” Adam Carlson, founding partner of the polling group Zenith Polls, wrote on X. “But I’ve waited patiently all day for him to forcefully condemn Hamas — watching dozens of other city & state electeds do so — and am still waiting. This is not only hurtful to me, but it’s bad politics & distracts from his agenda.”

New York magazine writer David Freedlander posted screenshots on X of texts sent to him on Friday afternoon from two city political operatives, both “broadly supportive of Mamdani.” 

The messages were identical: “Zohran is completely blowing this pro-Hamas protest thing.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was silent regarding an anti-Israel protest in Queens on Thursday that caused nearby schools and a synagogue to close early in anticipation of the demonstration where protesters chanted “We support Hamas.”

The radical group behind the protest, called Palestinian Assembly for Liberation [PAL]-Awda, wrote on social media Thursday afternoon that it would gather in the evening outside of an event held by CapitIL, a Jerusalem-based real estate agency, at the Modern Orthodox synagogue Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills. The post called it an “illegal event” promoting “blatant land theft and dispossession.”

Dozens of masked, keffiyeh-clad demonstrators gathered near the synagogue and chanted, “We support Hamas here,” “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the IDF” for more than two hours while banging on drums in the residential area in Queens’ heavily Jewish neighborhood of Kew Gardens Hills. One protester held a ripped Israeli flag that was painted red to resemble blood. The protest was also promoted by Columbia University Apartheid Divest. 

A heavy NYPD presence monitored the demonstration and set up a barrier keeping protesters about 300 feet from the synagogue, and away from a counterprotest happening across the street. 

The demonstration marked the first major test Mamdani has faced in protecting the city’s Jewish community since he was inaugurated last week. The same group led a protest in November outside of Park East Synagogue, where they gathered near the entrance, as it hosted a Nefesh B’Nefesh event providing information on immigration to Israel. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch later called the November protest “turmoil,” while Mamdani’s office said the event was promoting “activities in violation of international law,” a statement his spokesperson would later revise. 

Mamdani made no public statement regarding the protest on Thursday and his spokesperson did not respond to multiple inquiries from Jewish Insider, including one asking whether the mayor’s team had discouraged demonstrators from protesting and another asking if he condemned any of the slogans chanted.

After the announcement of the protest location, the synagogue canceled prayer services and two nearby schools, Yeshiva of Central Queens and PS 165, announced early closures. Democratic state Assemblymember Sam Berger, who represents the area, told JI that local principals, staff and parents were “very concerned.” The surrounding area was “completely upended,” he said.

“For our @NYCMayor who has said he ‘will always stand steadfast with our Jewish neighbors,’ I am calling on [Mamdani] for an immediate condemnation of this demonstration,” Berger wrote on X before the event. 

The National Jewish Advocacy Center, a Jewish legal advocacy group, sent a letter earlier Thursday to Mamdani noting that “penal Law §240.20 squarely prohibits disorderly conduct that causes or recklessly risks public alarm — including masked intimidation. These laws must be enforced equally,” the group wrote. 

Berger told JI during the protest that he was “grateful to the NYPD for the resources they deployed to keep order, but fielding dozens of calls from concerned parents and watching chaos descend on a peaceful community of working class New Yorkers was deplorable.”

“There is a time and a place to protest foreign policy and that is not in the middle of a residential neighborhood where families are simply trying to live their lives,” the assemblymember said. 

PAL-Awda had previously planned a protest outside a Nefesh B’Nefesh event in Manhattan on Wednesday night. Less than an hour before the event began, the group announced that the demonstration was canceled, without providing a reason. 

A few hours before Thursday evening’s demonstration was scheduled to begin, the group posted a series of instructions for participants including “mask up” and “bring Palestinian flags and signs.” 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Tuesday she plans to implement a policy establishing “safety zones” around houses of worship. Protesters on Thursday remained further from the synagogue than the proposed legislation’s required 25-foot buffer zone. 

As New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani draws increased scrutiny for picking some top appointees whose past incendiary social media comments have provoked controversy and raised questions over his vetting process, Jewish community leaders are now watching closely for signs of how the administration will make staffing decisions on key issues connected to Israel and antisemitism.

One person to keep an eye on is Josh Binderman, who served as Mamdani’s Jewish outreach director during the campaign and transition. He has largely maintained a low profile in his time working for the candidate and now mayor, garnering just a small handful of mentions in the press, despite his critical position leading engagement with a community that in many ways remains deeply skeptical of Mamdani’s hostile stances on Israel and commitment to implementing a clear strategy to counter rising antisemitism.

Binderman, most recently a communications manager for New Deal Strategies, an influential progressive consulting firm, served until 2024 as a PAC manager and a senior associate for J Street, the progressive Israel advocacy group, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

While Mamdani notably refused to work with the organization when he led a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine as an undergraduate student at Bowdoin College, the mayor has since developed a friendlier rapport with J Street, which has defended him amid charges that he tapped transition advisors who engaged in anti-Zionist activism that crossed a line into antisemitism.

Mamdani’s decision to employ a former top J Street staffer during the election suggests he could follow a similar approach to key Jewish community posts for his developing administration. If so, it could help to at least dampen some concerns from Jewish leaders who fear the mayor will end up hiring even harder-left members in his coalition such as activists associated with Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Israel advocacy group that aggressively promotes boycotts targeting the Jewish state.

It is still an open question, however, how Mamdani will move forward on such issues. His decision last week to revoke two executive orders linked to Israel and antisemitism was widely seen as a discouraging maneuver that eroded goodwill among mainstream Jewish leaders — even as Binderman had reportedly given some advance warning to leaders about the effort before the inauguration.

Mamdani otherwise chose to retain an office to combat antisemitism established by former Mayor Eric Adams. He has not disclosed who will steer the office now, though a person recently in touch with his team told Jewish Insider this week that Phylisa Wisdom, the executive director of New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive Zionist group, was floated as a possible candidate.

For his part, Binderman, who as a student was involved with BBYO, continues to be an unofficial “point person” for Jewish community outreach in the administration, according to one Jewish leader who has heard from him recently. Binderman is still feeling out a potential role in City Hall, according to other Jewish community leaders. He did not return a request for comment from JI.

Dora Pekec, a Mamdani spokesperson, told JI on Tuesday that the mayor’s team would have more to share on related appointments in the coming weeks and that such decisions “are still being worked out.”

Jewish leaders who have engaged with Binderman told JI their interactions with the young Mamdani aide have been largely positive. But they expressed some lingering doubts about his ability to influence the mayor himself. “He does seem eager and willing to help,” said one Orthodox community leader. “He does want to work together.”

“To what extent and how much freedom he has remains to be seen,” the leader explained to JI.

Another Jewish community leader who has spoken with Mamdani’s team echoed that view. Binderman, he told JI, has “always appeared to be level-headed, fair and reasonable. The question is, will the admin listen to his guidance?”

“Only Josh and Ali Najmi,” a top Mamdani advisor who maintains close ties to the Jewish community, “can land the Jewish plane,” the Jewish leader said. “But Zohran has to decide if he wants to land it.”

Days into Zohran Mamdani’s first week as mayor of New York City, some Jewish leaders are privately raising questions about whether his fledgling administration is prepared to implement a clear strategy to counter rising antisemitism, one of the key pledges of his campaign.

Even as he swiftly moved to revoke two executive orders tied to Israel and antisemitism on his first day in office, Mamdani has yet to disclose how he and his team plan to substantively address what he has repeatedly called “the scourge of antisemitism” in remarks vowing to protect Jewish New Yorkers.

The mayor, a democratic socialist and outspoken critic of Israel, faced backlash from leading Jewish groups last week after he repealed executive orders issued by former Mayor Eric Adams, including ones that adopted a working definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and banned city agencies from engaging in boycotts targeting Israel.

“He went from giving a speech about unity and collectivism to signing executive orders against the Jewish community,” one Jewish community leader said of Mamdani’s repeals.

Another Jewish leader in touch with Mamdani’s team echoed others who have emphasized that his advisers “need a plan” to counter antisemitism and that proposing a strategy is “important and should happen soon.”

The response so far has been limited. “A lot of ‘Yes, thanks for the feedback,’” the Jewish leader relayed. “I suspect they know and are working on it.”

While Mamdani also announced he would retain the office to combat antisemitism created last year by the Adams administration, he has otherwise not shared additional details about how it will be staffed or what specific issues it will prioritize.

Moshe Davis, who led the office under Adams, told Jewish Insider on Monday that he was “at his desk in City Hall,” but had not “heard much else” about the future of the office or his role in it. He said that on Friday he had distributed to officials an 80-page report produced by the office under Adams and publicly released last week.

The new report includes plans that Mamdani would likely oppose, such as training for all city employees on the IHRA definition, which labels some criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

One person familiar with the matter, who has spoken with Mamdani’s team, said that Davis will not be asked to continue on as the office’s executive director. Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive Zionist group, is rumored to be a front-runner for the role, though no final decisions have been made, the source told JI.

Wisdom said that she was not familiar with the hiring process, but looks “forward to seeing how the Mamdani administration plans to tackle what he has rightly called the ‘scourge of antisemitism’ facing our city.”

“This will require a comprehensive strategy,” she told JI on Monday, noting that the office to combat antisemitism “can play a key role, coordinating between long-standing offices and agencies tasked with combating hate, and input from the diversity of New York’s Jewish community.”

A spokesperson for Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. 

Other Jewish community leaders said they were now waiting to learn more about Mamdani’s plans for the office — which could shed early light on his approach to antisemitism as he enacts his agenda. 

“Haven’t heard anything beyond that he will retain the office but make some changes,” said one Jewish leader, who was unaware of what the changes would entail.

Mamdani, in defending his decision to revoke the executive orders, said last week his administration “will be relentless in its efforts to combat hate and division, and we will showcase that by fighting hate across the city.”

“That includes fighting the scourge of antisemitism by actually funding hate crime prevention, by celebrating our neighbors and by practicing a politics of universality,” he added during a Friday press conference.

Rabbi Joe Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis who served on Mamdani’s transition committee for emergency response, said he was taking a wait-and-see approach to the first few weeks of the administration. “No further details have been released so there is nothing more to add at this time,” he told JI. “Let’s wait and see if there are changes.”

Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said that the administration “has a real opportunity to not just signal its commitment to Jewish safety but to take real action.”

“From increased investment in hate crimes prevention to expansion of proven education tools, Mayor Mamdani can build this office into a hub to advance a comprehensive strategy to counter antisemitism and advance Jewish inclusion and safety,” she told JI.

Newly inaugurated New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism for repealing executive orders issued by former Mayor Eric Adams aimed at tackling antisemitism, including implementing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and an anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions order.

The revocation of those orders came as part of a blanket repeal of all of Adams’ executive orders following his September 2024 indictment on federal corruption charges, which Mamdani said “was a date that marked a moment when many New Yorkers decided politics held nothing for them.”

In a joint statement, the UJA-Federation of New York, Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, American Jewish Committee of New York, Anti-Defamation League of New York/New Jersey, Agudath Israel of America, the New York Board of Rabbis and the Orthodox Union said that the Jewish community “will be looking for clear and sustained leadership that demonstrates a serious commitment to confronting antisemitism and ensures that the powers of the mayor’s office are used to promote safety and unity, not to advance divisive efforts such as BDS.

“Singling Israel out for sanction is not the way to make Jewish New Yorkers feel included and safe, and will undermine any words to that effect,” the statement continued.

William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said that the repeal of the executive orders “is a troubling indicator of the direction in which [Mamdani] is leading the city, just one day at the helm.”

“Repealing [the IHRA definition] diminishes New York City’s ability to recognize and respond to antisemitism at a time when incidents continue to rise,” Daroff said in a statement. “New York City should lead with moral clarity and resolve in confronting antisemitism. This decision points in the opposite direction.”

The Anti-Defamation League of New York and New Jersey said it is “deeply troubled that on his first day in office Mayor Mamdani weakened protections to fight antisemitism by revoking executive orders adopting the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and providing safeguards against Israel-related discrimination in city procurement and pension decision-making.”

“While the continuation of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism (MOCA) is welcome and important, revoking these executive orders removes key tools for addressing antisemitism, including BDS-driven efforts that seek to demonize, delegitimize, and isolate the world’s only Jewish state,” the ADL continued.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said that the Department of Justice “will be extremely vigilant … as to ANY AND ALL violations of religious liberties in NYC. We will investigate, sue, and indict as needed.”

New York State Assemblymember Sam Berger, a Democrat, said, “I find it highly concerning that on day one, under the cover of a sweeping EO, @NYCMayor repealed the IHRA definition from NYC law. Removing how a majority of Jewish New Yorkers define hatred towards us doesn’t exactly build trust.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said on X that the repeal shows Mamdani’s “true face.”

“This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire,” the statement continued.

Israeli Ambassador Ofir Akuns, the consul general of Israel in New York, called Mamdani’s moves “dangerous” and said they “pose an immediate threat to the safety of Jewish communities in New York City and could lead to an increase in violent antisemitic attacks throughout the city.”

Responding to a story about the executive order, Department of Justice senior counsel Leo Terrell said, “To Jewish Americans who voted for Mamdani! SHAME ON YOU!”

New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, a Republican, called for federal action to protect Jewish institutions in response to the repeal of another Adams executive order placing additional restrictions on protest outside of religious institutions.

“We need to enforce federal law that’s already in place here because the pro-Hamas antisemites emboldened by [Mamdani] are coming,” Vernikov said on X, tagging Dhillon and Terrell.

Mamdani issued a new executive order largely mirroring Adams’ order on the same issue.

He also announced on Thursday that he would keep the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, created by Adams, in operation, stating that he takes the issue “very seriously.”

Both of those moves were praised in the joint statement from the New York Jewish organizations.

His office, however, deleted multiple posts from the mayoral X account about a recent report on antisemitism in the city issued by that office under Adams, which also elicited criticism. Mamdani has not said what the office’s work going forward will entail or who will staff it.

Mark Goldfeder, the director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, said on X that it is “[h]ard to overstate how disturbing it is that one of the first acts of the new @NYCMayor was to delete official tweets and EO’s addressing the protection of Jewish New Yorkers,” a sentiment echoed in a letter he sent to Mamdani.

Adams, who attended Mamdani’s inauguration, also repeatedly criticized the new mayor.

“[Mamdani] promised a New Era and unity today. This isn’t new. And it isn’t unity,” Adams said on X, adding later, “To my knowledge, neither [former New York mayors Michael] Bloomberg, [Bill] de Blasio, nor Adams scrubbed antisemitism tweets on day one. I’ve been clear: I will be vocal in defending our Jewish brothers and sisters, just as they stood up for African Americans during the civil rights era.”

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley stood, somber, next to the city’s police chief on Thursday night as he announced a shocking end to the dayslong manhunt that followed a mass shooting at Brown University, where a gunman killed two students and injured nine more. The suspect had fled to Massachusetts, where he allegedly killed an MIT professor, and then killed himself in a storage unit in New Hampshire. 

The next morning, on Friday, Smiley sat in his dark City Hall office before dawn, describing the surreal saga in an interview with a local NBC affiliate.

“Everything about this situation is tragic, but at least we now know there is a definitive end to it,” Smiley said, sitting in front of a Hanukkah menorah. “Now we can start the healing process as a community.” 

As the Rhode Island capital city, home to some 190,000 people, has found itself a fixture in the national news, Smiley has also found himself in the spotlight. The 46-year-old Democrat didn’t lead the investigation — that was up to law enforcement, who he commended on Thursday for their hard work. He sees a different role for himself that will continue long after the sudden end to this crisis. 

“I think my job in the days to come is to help our community heal, to process the trauma that they’ve been through,” Smiley said at a vigil last Sunday. A long-planned communal holiday gathering, meant to be a Hanukkah celebration and a Christmas tree lighting, had turned into a place for people to grieve together.

“As a Jewish mayor on the first night of Hanukkah … [which celebrates] a story which involves one day’s worth of oil lasting eight nights, it is I think very timely and appropriate that we light the first Hanukkah candle tonight to bring a little bit of light into our community that could desperately need it at this time,” Smiley told ABC News last week.

The mayor leaned on his own faith in the days afterward. Aside from taking part in the menorah lighting, he stopped by his synagogue, Temple Beth-El, and spoke several times last week to Rabbi Sarah Mack. 

“He’s a lovely, wonderful person with deeply rooted morals and values, and he has found his Jewish faith to be incredibly meaningful to him,” Mack told Jewish Insider on Thursday. “I think he would say the same thing.” (Smiley’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

The two got to know each other well over the last two years, after Smiley decided to explore Judaism. One of his grandfathers was Jewish, but Smiley had grown up in a Protestant family and largely left his faith behind as a teenager. Then, in 2023, he approached Mack about converting to Judaism. Smiley was sworn in as mayor earlier that year, and the difficult policy choices he had to make began to weigh on him.

“Some of these decisions are heavy, and so having a stronger foundation and a community where I can lean into a little bit more, a sense of what’s right, what’s just and how to do better and be better, was something that I was craving,” Smiley told The Boston Globe in late 2024. “Over the last couple of years, I found myself really looking and yearning for a little more spiritual and moral guidance, and a community that felt right to me and that felt like it was my place.” 

Smiley went in the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, to mark the completion of his conversion in August 2024. At the time, he had not yet announced publicly that he had converted to Judaism. But people in the community began to guess when he appeared at tashlich, a service on Rosh Hashanah where Jews symbolically cast off their sins by throwing bread into a body of water. 

“I think I underestimated how newsworthy this was,” he told the Globe. But Smiley is not the first Jewish mayor of Providence, nor is he even the first gay Jewish Providence mayor. That distinction goes to David Cicilline, a former member of Congress who served as Providence mayor from 2003 to 2011. (Smiley worked in Cicilline’s mayoral office.)

Becoming a Jew after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, and amid rising antisemitism in the United States, was not without challenges. 

“I think what the rabbi said to me was, now, more than ever, do we need Jews who are willing to speak out about their values, and there’s a community waiting for you,” Smiley said. 

Even before his conversion was complete, and before anyone knew he was considering it, Smiley was beginning to speak on national stages about the importance of fighting antisemitism. He attended the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Mayors Summit in Fort Lauderdale in 2023, and since then he has become active in the organization. He now leads its mayors advisory board and received an award at CAM’s annual conference in New Orleans earlier this month. 

“From my relationship with him professionally, what I have seen is that his connection to Judaism adds a deeper sensitivity to how antisemitism shows up in real life: the double standards, the coded language, the intimidation, and the way Jewish residents can be made to feel unsafe, isolated or singled out,” Lisa Katz, CAM’s chief government affairs officer, told JI. “He’s motivated by a very local, very practical instinct that if a community is being targeted, City Hall has an obligation to respond with clarity and consistency.” 

Smiley has had to navigate antisemitism since his conversion, and he is facing a far-left Democratic challenger in next year’s primary who has gone after Smiley for his involvement with CAM and his work fighting antisemitism. 

In May, the night before Smiley left for a trip to Israel, protesters showed up at his house chanting “free Palestine” and “Smiley, how many babies have you killed today?” 

“In addition to making me angry, it feels antisemitic to me,” Smiley said in an interview this year. “I mean, the Jewish mayor is going to Israel and you protest his house? Politicians may take trips all the time. I’ve taken trips before. I didn’t get protested on any of those other trips. So, that’s very difficult.” 

He had first traveled to Israel nearly a decade ago, when he worked for then-Gov. Gina Raimondo. This year’s trip, with the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island, the main Jewish communal organization in the state, was Smiley’s first since converting. 

“It was personally meaningful spiritually, to be able to bring in Shabbat at the Kotel for the first time as a Jew. That was really special,” Smiley said.

He has often been spotted wearing the yellow hostage ribbon over the past two years, even when discussing unrelated issues. Smiley has said repeatedly that his job as mayor has nothing to do with foreign policy — that’s the argument he made when members of the Providence City Council decided earlier this year to fly a Palestinian flag in the council chambers, an action he called “divisive.” But fighting antisemitism, Smiley has said, is an area where he can make a difference locally.

“What I hope is, for leaders like me, who do not have a vote in Congress, who don’t have a role in federal or foreign affairs, there is other stuff that we are responsible for,” Smiley said this year. “And that is why I’ve been so engaged in the antisemitism work, because this kind of 30,000 foot global conversation is affecting the lives of members of my community in America, having nothing to do with votes over arms sales.” 

Next on Smiley’s Jewish bucket list is a bar mitzvah, something he is studying for now in a class for adults. He is learning Hebrew, too, with flash cards.

“There will definitely be a party, and there has been already ample discussion about that in class,” Smiley told the Globe. “We haven’t picked a theme yet, but everyone’s very excited about it. There’s gonna be a DJ. We’re gonna find a venue. It’s a whole thing.”

Jamaal Bowman, the far-left former House member who is pursuing an appointment as New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s public schools chancellor, recently posted a comment on Instagram supporting remarks from neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

Bowman made the comment on an Instagram reel posted by Fuentes in September, which featured the antisemitic commentator making the case that Republicans weren’t a “better” choice than Democrats for working people, but were instead “better” for Israel, the oil and gas industry, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The caption on the video, which has 2.6 million views and more than 239 thousand likes, reads: “The type of Racist ifw [I f*** with].”

“Finally getting it Nick. Now go a step further,” Bowman wrote in the comment, which was still up as of Thursday evening. “This is the same playbook they use to divide and conquer us based on race to maintain their oligarchy. It’s us, against the oligarchy. Now no more racist bullshit from you.”

Bowman, a former middle school principal, lost his bid for a second term in the House to Rep. George Latimer (D-NY) in the Democratic primary, in part because of his radical views toward Israel and extreme rhetoric. 

Now out of Washington, Bowman revealed to supporters last month that he has been “pushing hard” for Mamdani to name him as schools chancellor so he could lead a “revolution in our public schools,” according to the New York Post. Bowman made the comments during a Zoom call in early November organized by the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter.

“I’m an educator, lifelong educator. When we get universal child care, y’all, it’s going to lead to a revolution in our public schools!” Bowman said on the call. 

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s newly tapped director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resigned on Thursday afternoon after her history of antisemitic online posts — including complaining about “money hungry Jews” — was exposed.

“Catherine expressed her deep remorse over her past statements and tendered her resignation, and [Mamdani] accepted,” Dora Pekec, the mayor-elect’s transition team spokesperson, said in a statement to Jewish Insider.

Da Costa, who previously served as executive assistant to former Mayor Bill DeBlasio and was appointed by Mamdani on Wednesday, posted a series of antisemitic comments in 2011 and 2012, which were shared by the Anti-Defamation League. Da Costa’s account — and the posts, which had remained online — was deleted once the antisemitism watchdog published her posts on Thursday. 

“Money hungry Jews smh,” Da Costa posted on X in January 2011, according to screenshots. 

“Woo! Promoted to the upstairs office today! Working alongside these rich Jewish peeps,” she posted in June 2011.

In June 2012, Da Costa wrote that the “Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” a reference to the neighborhood’s sizable Jewish population. 

Da Costa resigned on Thursday, saying that she “spoke with the Mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements. These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”

Sara Forman, executive director of the New York Solidarity Network, praised “cutting ties” with Da Costa as” the right thing to do,” but added that “had she said ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jew’ the response from the incoming Mamdani administration and the outcome we just witnessed would likely have been quite different.”

“This is why we have been telling Mr. Mamdani all along that all anti-Jewish rhetoric, including anti-Zionist dog whistles, cannot just be ‘discouraged,’ it must be rejected and condemned outright,” Forman said in a statement.

The Anti-Defamation League of New York and New Jersey condemned the posts on X before Da Costa’s resignation, writing that they “echo classic antisemitic tropes and otherwise demean Jewish people.” 

“We appreciate Da Costa has relationships with members of the Jewish community, but her posts require immediate explanation — not just from Ms. Da Costa, but also from the Mayor-Elect,” the ADL said in a statement. 

The recently unearthed posts come as several of Mamdani’s transition appointees have drawn scrutiny from Jewish leaders, who remain skeptical of the mayor-elect, who takes office on Jan. 1, and his commitment to fighting antisemitism. 

Among the most controversial of his appointments is Tamika Mallory, a former Women’s March leader who stepped down from its board amid allegations of antisemitism, to a newly established community safety committee.

While the Democratic Party’s far-left wing has gained ground in New York City — an ascendance reflected in Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory — in the moderate-minded suburbs outside of the city, Democrats are reeling from the party’s embrace of its radical elements.

To that end, moderate Democrats are stepping up in key races, aggressively distancing themselves from the far-left wing of the party — and hoping the taint doesn’t affect the party’s brand at large heading into next year’s midterm elections. 

Rory Lancman, a civil rights attorney and former state assemblyman, is one of those moderate candidates looking to showcase the other side of the Democratic Party. He launched an exploratory committee on Monday in a heavily Jewish state Senate district in Long Island, which is currently held by Republican state Sen. Jack Martins.

“The Democratic brand has been severely damaged by Mamdani and others, particularly [for] those Democrats like myself who are deeply committed to the safety and security of Israel, and deeply committed to the safety and security of the American Jewish community — whether it’s in our synagogues or on college campuses,” Lancman told Jewish Insider. 

Lancman, 56, previously served as a member of the New York State Assembly, representing the 25th District in Queens from 2007 to 2013. He then served in the New York City Council from 2014 until 2020, where he was among the sponsors of a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel. 

Currently, he serves as director of corporate initiatives and senior counsel at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, where he oversees lawsuits alleging antisemitism in the workplace, in labor unions and on college campuses. 

Lancman’s interest in returning to the political arena is driven by a desire to counter “the kind of anti-Israel agenda that Mamdani has committed himself to,” he told JI, referring to the incoming mayor’s hostile views about Israel, including his refusal to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada” and pledge to discontinue the New York City-Israel Economic Council, a new joint initiative between the two governments aimed at building economic ties. 

“There’s a lot the state legislature could do,” Lancman continued. “It’s important for New York state to adopt the definition of antisemitism that is clear to be applied in circumstances all across the state, that’s the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition which many states have adopted. It’s hard to solve a problem if you lack a basic definition of what that problem is.” (The definition is recognized and used by specific local governments, state entities and institutions within New York, but has not been universally adopted by the state.)  

Lancman also called for reform to New York anti-discrimination laws “to make it easier for Jewish students to bring claims of discrimination under state law and to make it easier for Jewish businesses experiencing BDS to bring claims under state law.”

“We need to protect our houses of worship by adopting a New York State version of the Federal Faith Act, which is a law that can be strengthened and made useful in New York,” said Lancman. “I would like to see New York state explicitly prohibit any film production company that is engaged in BDS from being eligible for a New York state film tax credit.” 

“We need to take real steps to protect our houses of worship and protect us from violence on the street. All of these tools are the ones I’ve used in the last two years [at the Brandeis Center] to protect Jews who have experienced antisemitism.”  

For example, he’d like to see New York’s longstanding anti-mask laws, which were abolished during the COVID pandemic, reinstated. “If someone is walking around in a protest and covering their face, whether it’s with a white hood or a keffiyeh, it’s probably because they’re up to no good. We had a mask law in New York for decades and everyone understood its value.”

“We need to protect our houses of worship by adopting a New York State version of the Federal Faith Act, which is a law that can be strengthened and made useful in New York,” continued Lancman. “I would like to see New York state explicitly prohibit any film production company that is engaged in BDS from being eligible for a New York state film tax credit.” 

Identifying himself as a centrist, Lancman said he is well-placed to earn the trust of Democratic voters, many of whom cite their primary issue as the high cost of living in Nassau County. Like many Democrats, Lancman is “disturbed by things coming out of Washington,” but also has a “lingering mistrust about whether the Democratic Party is committed to defending Jewish life in this country.” 

The state Democratic Party chair, Jay Jacobs, who has spoken out against Mamdani, backed Lancman’s effort to flip the seat, saying earlier this week that “Rory’s lifetime of service to New York and record of delivering for Long Islanders would make him an excellent candidate, and we’re enthusiastic at the prospect of him running.” 

Martins’ office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from JI. While representing Nassau County’s District 7, which has a sizable Jewish community, Martins has advocated for increased security funding for Jewish (and other nonpublic) schools through the Nonpublic School Safety Equipment Grant. In February 2023, the NYS Senate Republican Conference appointed him to chair the Antisemitism Working Group, which produced a report on the rise of antisemitism in 2024.

The campaign arm of the state Senate Republicans called Lancman the product of “extreme City Council policies that drove up costs.”

“We can’t sacrifice one of our two major political parties to the antisemitic leadership and agenda, that would be catastrophic for the Jewish community in the United States and I refuse to surrender my party to the Zohran Mamdanis of the world,” said Lancman.

“My record, my consistent views, my outspoken opposition to Mamdani, will earn people’s trust on the issue of Israel and combating antisemitism,” Lancman told JI. “From there, we can talk about the things that clearly favor Democrats, which are making life more affordable from property taxes to energy costs, those are our issues. In a district like this though, a Democrat has got to establish a real connection and trust on defending Jewish life in this country.”  

In the state Assembly, Lancman said he would draw on a mantra he’s adopted from his time at the Brandeis Center: “That civil rights laws also protect Jews and that those laws need to be exercised to their fullest and need to be expanded and made robust as possible to address the antisemitic threats we are experiencing at this moment in time,” he said. 

“We can’t sacrifice one of our two major political parties to the antisemitic leadership and agenda, that would be catastrophic for the Jewish community in the United States and I refuse to surrender my party to the Zohran Mamdanis of the world,” continued Lancman. “Being able to convert one’s beliefs and point of view into actual legislation and policy, and have an effect on protecting Jews, is not easy. The job is not just proclamation. The job is making people’s lives better, and in the case of the Jewish community, it is quite literally protecting our place in this country.”

“I confess to being disappointed that Democrats aren’t making a bright line litmus test out of whether someone supports the existence of the Jewish state,” said Lancman, adding that his work at Brandeis Center since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks has “reinforced” the belief that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism and that if you hate the Jewish state, you hate the Jewish people.” 

“We see that played out every day in this country and around the world. We cannot let that ideology take hold in the Democratic party, and I’m committed to defeating anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the Democratic party. You don’t need to bend the knee to antisemitism or socialism to be a Democrat.”

Prominent Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch left a meeting on Thursday afternoon with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and a dozen diverse rabbis and community leaders feeling “encouraged,” saying that there is “reason to be optimistic” that Mamdani will protect the Jewish community.  

Still, given Mamdani’s affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America and antagonistic views on Israel — including his refusal to condemn the term “globalize the intifada” —  Hirsch told Jewish Insider there remains “reason for the New York Jewish community to be anxious about Israel and safety.”

“I hope that our concerns will be proven to be less acute given the mayor-elect’s behavior in office, but we’ll have to wait and see,” said Hirsch, senior rabbi of the Upper West Side’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and a self-described liberal who voiced opposition to Mamdani throughout the mayoral election. 

Hirsch, who spoke with JI following the mayor-elect’s private meeting with the New York Board of Rabbis, of which Hirsch is the president, said he was “encouraged by [Mamdani’s] willingness to continue to dialogue, knowing in advance that he’s going into meetings with people who have significant disagreements with him, and that he continues to be open to having these kinds of discussions.”

“That’s good for the New York Jewish community,” he continued. “I wasn’t surprised that this meeting happened because I think he is making an effort to reach out to as many representatives, particularly in the Jewish community, as he can. I think he’s trying to do that for his own sense of what is in his political interest and the well-being of the Jewish community. There’s reason to be optimistic.” 

The meeting was held just weeks before Mamdani’s Jan. 1 inauguration — and as the Jewish community remains divided about his victory. Hirsch was among the leading Jewish voices expressing concern during Mamdani’s election over his hostility toward Israel. Hirsch also publicly expressed frustration with the lack of organized effort among Jewish leaders to oppose the then-candidate. Days before the election, he told JI that opposition to Mamdani is a Jewish “imperative.” 

Hirsch declined to share the content of Thursday’s meeting, but called it “productive.” 

“The mayor-elect stayed a little longer than anticipated so we were pleased with that,” he told JI. “He listened attentively. We shared our concerns. We agreed that we’ll set up a mechanism to meet regularly with him and his senior staff so we can keep lines of communication open. We agreed to keep content and details confidential.”  

Ahead of the meeting, invitees told CNN that several rabbis planned to “propose a unified agenda, asking Mamdani to back away from his rejection of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state” and his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Some Jewish leaders also said they “will put pressure on other New York officials like Gov. Kathy Hochul and incoming city council speaker Julie Menin to not work with Mamdani more broadly if he follows through on promised anti-Israel moves and doesn’t provide more reassurances to Jews in the city.” 

In addition to Hirsch, other rabbis in attendance on Thursday, according to CNN, included Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Temple Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue; and Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of the Modern Orthodox Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue.  

“It’s in the interest of the Jewish community to keep an open line of communication with [Mamdani],” said Hirsch. “He’s a talented politician and very charismatic. You can understand how he was able to connect with people. I hope, for our sake and the sake of New York generally, he will pursue the policy matters that he ran on and not focus on things that happen overseas.” 

On Wednesday night, Mamdani — wearing a kippah — attended an event hosted by the Satmar Hasidic movement in Brooklyn marking Kuf Alef Kislev, an annual celebration of the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum’s escape from the Nazis in 1944. The New York City Satmar movement, which is anti-Zionist, was split over its endorsement of Mamdani during the election.

The leftward lurch of the Democratic Party over the last year can be documented in many ways: The sudden rise of Zohran Mamdani as mayor-elect of New York City, the surge of far-left candidates running on socialist, anti-Israel platforms and the party accommodating a panoply of activist views, including anti-Israel activism, instead of drawing red lines against extremism.

But all of these developments don’t directly impact the party’s electoral fortunes, especially since the surge of left-wing activism has mainly predominated in the most-progressive parts of the country, like New York City, Seattle and safe Democratic districts.

But now there are clear signs that Democratic voters are rallying behind out-of-the-mainstream, in-your-face candidates in battleground and even GOP-leaning states and districts, developments that are putting races out of play for a party that’s hoping to ride an anti-Trump wave back into power in next year’s midterms.

Nowhere is the party’s leftward evolution clearer than in Texas, a conservative-minded state where the Senate race was potentially competitive as a result of GOP infighting. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is facing a serious primary threat from the state’s right-wing, scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton. The Democratic thinking: If Paxton won the nomination, a mainstream candidate with a track record of winning persuadable voters could at least force Republicans to spend money to defend red-state turf next year. 

To that end, Colin Allred, a former NFL player and center-left suburban lawmaker who was elected to the House in 2018 by winning over independents and some moderate Republicans, jumped into the race. Allred lost to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in 2024, but cut the GOP victory margin in the race to eight points — about half of President Donald Trump’s 14-point margin against Kamala Harris.

Allred’s brand of pragmatic politics was quickly overtaken this year by candidates drawing attention for their social media virality. Texas state Rep. James Talarico quickly emerged as an Allred alternative, offering a brand of TV-ready, populist progressivism that some party strategists thought could be a model for candidates looking to appeal to the base without insulting conservatives. Even though his voting record is liberal, the fact he went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and talked about faith drew him a niche following within the party.

But all that strategic posturing was rendered moot, after the polarizing and progressive Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) announced her candidacy on Monday, emerging as a front-runner in the Democratic primary even as most strategists view her as a surefire loser in a general election — no matter who Republicans nominate. What’s concerning Democrats even more is that if she’s nominated, her long history of controversial comments could hurt Democrats looking to hang on for reelection in competitive districts.

In a sign of where the energy in the party lies, Allred quickly announced he was dropping out of the Senate race and instead is pursuing a comeback bid in the House. Talarico is sticking around, and while his team is optimistic they can win the primary, they acknowledge they’re starting out with a double-digit deficit against the more-prominent Crockett.

If Democrats want to entertain any hopes of winning back the Senate majority, they have to prevail in at least two GOP-held seats in conservative territory — Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Alaska being the most realistic options. Putting Texas in play was always seen as part of that playbook, even as Democrats privately acknowledged their odds are long.

With Crockett as the nominee, not only does Texas fall out of contention, but the opportunity for Democrats to drain GOP resources in defending a red state also would become more unlikely. 

And what’s worrying Democrats is that the trend of voters rallying behind far-left candidates who aren’t electable is percolating far beyond Texas. In a Tennessee congressional special election this month, the party nominated state Rep. Aftyn Behn, a candidate nicknamed the “AOC of Tennessee,” as their standard-bearer against more-moderate alternatives in the primary. The race in a Trump-friendly district became competitive because of the GOP’s political problems, but Behn wasn’t able to exploit the opportunity because of her record.

There are many candidates emerging with backgrounds like Crockett and Behn in congressional primaries across the country. They’re the type of candidates who can win in deep-blue constituencies, but the party pays a price when they’re nominated in swing districts.  

CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere summed up the Democrats’ dilemma clearly: “This seems like a classic case of the party seeing a potential Republican disaster it could take advantage of, then laying the groundwork for the Democrats’ own disaster.”  

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday he would visit New York City despite Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s threat to have him arrested on war crimes charges if he does so.

Asked by host Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, taking place in New York, about Mamdani’s threat to fulfill a warrant issued last year by the International Criminal Court — to which the U.S. is not a party — Netanyahu, speaking via video from Jerusalem, scoffed and said, “I’ll come to New York.”

As to whether he would meet with Mamdani, Netanyahu said: “If he changes his mind and says we [Israel] have a right to exist, that’ll be a good opening for a conversation.” Audible laughter at his response could be heard from the audience.

Netanyahu also addressed one of the major political news stories of the week — his request to Israeli President Isaac Herzog for a pardon amid his yearslong corruption trial.

“What [President Donald Trump] calls a witch hunt — and it is — has been going on for 10 years … I’m supposed to spend three days a week, eight hours a day in that trial, and I have got a few other things to do,” the prime minister quipped.

Netanyahu was indicted in 2020 in three cases: for allegedly advancing the interests of Israeli Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan while accepting gifts from him; for allegedly negotiating with Yediot Aharonot publisher Arnon Mozes to outlaw rival newspaper Israel Hayom’s free business model in exchange for favorable coverage; and for allegedly accepting a bribe of positive media coverage on news site Walla in exchange for regulatory changes benefitting then-Bezeq Telecom owner Shaul Elovitch.

Netanyahu noted in his remarks that the judges overseeing the trial suggested that the prosecution drop the bribery charge, said Walla never stopped covering him negatively, and dismissed the rest of the charges — fraud and breach of trust — as “a Bugs Bunny doll, champagne and cigars.” 

The prime minister said that Israeli law does not require him to admit guilt when requesting a pardon, “and I don’t. It’s a nonsense trial. … It’s a joke. It’s so silly, so stupid.” 

Netanyahu argued a pardon is “right for the country, right for our future. There are a lot of tasks at hand.”

“I think history beckons. We have opportunities for peace, enormous opportunities in AI and quantum [computing] … We have the opportunity to seize the future in a way that can help the entire Middle East and the world,” he added.

Good Tuesday morning.

In today’s Daily Kickoff, we look at how New York City Councilmember Julie Menin’s potential leadership of the council could impact Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s policies, and report on the upcoming House Committee vote on designating Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups as terror organizations. We preview today’s closely watched special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, and have the exclusive on Rep. Ritchie Torres’ new bill to codify the Coast Guard’s anti-swastika policy. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Eli Zabar, Marc Rowan, Josh Kushner and Sam Altman.

Today’s Daily Kickoff was curated by Jewish Insider Executive Editor Melissa Weiss and Israel Editor Tamara Zieve with assists from Danielle Cohen-Kanik and Marc Rod. Have a tip? Email us here.

What We’re Watching

• In Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District today, Republican Matt Van Epps and Democrat Aftyn Behn face off in the special election to replace Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), who resigned over the summer. More below.
• In Washington, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates is holding its annual National Day celebration.
• Elsewhere in Washington, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is hosting the premiere of “The Last Twins,” a documentary about the efforts of Erno “Zvi” Spiegel, a Hungarian Jewish man and prisoner at Auschwitz who protected twins imprisoned at the concentration camp.
• Israel Hayom is holding its first New York summit today in Manhattan. Speakers include the Israeli daily’s publisher Dr. Miriam Adelson, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams, U.S. Special Envoy for Hostage Response Adam Boehler, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder, TWG Global managing partner and former Biden administration senior official Amos Hochstein, the Justice Department’s Harmeet Dhillon and former hostages Guy Gilboa Dallal and Evyatar David.
• The Combat Antisemitism Movement is holding its 2025 North American Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism in New Orleans.
• In Miami, Art Basel kicks off today and runs through the weekend.

What You Should Know

A QUICK WORD WITH JI’S Josh Kraushaar

Today’s special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District — covering parts of Nashville, its conservative suburbs and rural counties in middle Tennessee — was expected to be a sleepy affair, given that the district backed President Donald Trump with 60% of the vote in 2024. The state’s aggressively partisan redistricting in 2021 was intended to guarantee GOP dominance of the state’s congressional delegation, leaving just one Democratic district in Memphis.

But in a sign that Trump’s growing unpopularity is creating unforeseen problems for Republicans in conservative constituencies, the race between Republican military veteran Matt Van Epps, a former state Cabinet secretary, and Democratic state Rep. Aftyn Behn is highly competitive. 

The fact that polls show the race tightening — with one Emerson College poll showing Van Epps in a statistical tie with Behn — is a sign of just how treacherous the political landscape has become for Republicans. Gallup’s latest survey found Trump with a 36% job approval, close to an all-time low throughout his two terms in office.  

If Republicans are nervous about holding a seat that Trump won by 22 points, there’s a growing likelihood of a blue wave that would give Democrats comfortable control of the House and an outside shot at a Senate majority. (One useful benchmark: Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) carried the 7th District by just two points in her 2018 Senate race, the last election year when Democrats rode a wave to win back the House.)

The fact that Republicans are struggling to make the case that the unapologetically progressive Behn holds views out of step with the conservative district on everything from anti-police rhetoric to antipathy towards her home city of Nashville to a record of hostility against Israel is also a sign of how nationalized our politics have become. In today’s tribal world, candidate quality and specific policy views mean a lot less than the overall political mood (vibes) and the popularity of the president.

Read the rest of ‘What You Should Know’ here.

IDEOLOGICAL COUNTERWEIGHT

Likely NYC council speaker Julie Menin on a collision course with Mayor-elect Mamdani

Julie Menin, a moderate Jewish Democrat from Manhattan who last week declared an early victory in the New York City Council speaker race, is widely expected to serve as an ideological counterweight to the incoming administration of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Some of their biggest clashes could stem from their sharply opposing views on Israel and antisemitism, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel reports.

Diverging approaches: Menin, who would be the council’s first Jewish speaker if officially elected in January during an internal vote, is an outspoken supporter of Israel and visited the country on a solidarity trip months after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. For his part, Mamdani, a 34-year-old Queens state assemblyman, has long been a detractor of Israel — whose right to exist as a Jewish state he has refused to recognize. He has indicated that he could move to enact some policies aligning with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting the Jewish state, even as he has also promised to protect Jewish New Yorkers by calling for a major increase in funding to prevent hate crimes, among other measures.

Read the full story here.

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ON DECK

House Committee to vote on Muslim Brotherhood terrorist designation bill

Just over a week after the Trump administration announced moves to designate branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations, the House Foreign Affairs Committee is set to discuss and vote on legislation that aims to classify the entire organization globally as a terrorist group on Wednesday, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Side by side: The bipartisan House legislation, led by Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), would instruct the Department of State to assess whether each branch of the Muslim Brotherhood operating globally meets the requirements for designation as a terrorist group. It would then use those determinations to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group in its entirety. The legislation may go further than the current executive action on the issue, which does not specifically mandate assessments of each Muslim Brotherhood branch and does not directly aim to proscribe the entire Muslim Brotherhood.

Read the full story here.

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UNSAVORY ALLIANCE

Cori Bush poses for picture with influencer who defended Capital Jewish Museum killings

Former Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who is challenging Rep. Wesley Bell (D-MO) to reclaim her former seat in Congress, posed for a photo with Guy Christensen, an anti-Israel influencer who defended the Capital Jewish Museum shooting, in which two Israeli Embassy employees were murdered, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

Background: The influencer posted a photo last week from what appears to be a recent American Muslims for Palestine conference — Christensen is wearing an AMP lanyard and speaker badge — alongside a smiling Bush, with the caption “We’re coming for you AIPAC.” Christensen, on TikTok, lauded Elias Rodriguez, who has been indicted for the D.C. shooting, encouraging his followers to support the alleged gunman, characterizing the shooting as “justified” and an “act of resistance,” and urging his followers to respond with “greater resistance and escalation.”

Read the full story here.

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BAD MEDICINE

Jewish health-care professionals demand action against ‘anti-Zionism’ in medicine

Jewish medical practitioners have faced “two years of near-constant abuse and a far longer erosion of professional norms,” according to an open letter published this week decrying the reach of anti-Zionist ideology in the medical field. More than 1,000 health-care professionals signed onto the letter, the latest of several similar attempts by Jewish doctors, therapists and nurses to garner attention about the exclusion and harassment that many say they have faced in their fields since the Oct. 7 terror attacks in Israel two years ago, Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports. 

Wider worries: But in this latest missive, its authors and signatories allege that anti-Zionism is a problem unto itself in the medical field — an argument that comes as many people who face accusations of antisemitism defend themselves by saying they are merely opposed to Israel, and not to Jews. The letter marks a rhetorical shift by medical professionals that reflects a broader set of concerns about the influence of anti-Israel ideas in medicine. Anti-Zionism, the letter’s authors write, presents a risk not just to Jewish patients but to the medical field’s integrity.

Read the full story here.

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EXCLUSIVE

Ritchie Torres introduces bill to codify Coast Guard’s anti-swastika policy

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) on Monday introduced legislation to codify a policy in the Coast Guard prohibiting displays of swastikas and other hate symbols, following backlash last week over a new Coast Guard policy that loosened the previous ban on such displays, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports.

What it does: Torres’ bill would prohibit the Coast Guard from issuing, without congressional approval, “any guidance that is less restrictive on prohibiting divisive or hate symbols and flags” than the updated policy issued following the public backlash, which partially, although not fully, reinstated the previous policy. The new policy states that “divisive or hate symbols and flags are prohibited,” including swastikas.

Read the full story here.

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VETO VISION

U.N. member states push to eliminate Security Council veto

Members of the United Nations General Assembly are renewing their push to curb or eliminate the Security Council veto, intensifying concern over whether such a reform would make it easier for the international body to target Israel, Jewish Insider’s Matthew Shea reports.

Eye on Israel: The “veto initiative,” adopted in 2022, requires the General Assembly to convene a debate any time a permanent member of the Security Council — the United States, United Kingdom, France, China or Russia — blocks a resolution. During the war between Israel and Hamas, the Security Council attempted multiple times to pass resolutions calling for an “immediate” and “unconditional” ceasefire in Gaza. The United States often cast the lone veto, arguing the measures were one-sided and would ultimately benefit Hamas. “Anti-Israel bias at the United Nations is pervasive, and the U.S. veto is the only thing standing in the way of the body passing binding resolutions that would pose a danger to the Jewish state,” said David May, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Read the full story here.

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Worthy Reads

Target on Their Backs: The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells spotlights the rise in political violence targeting U.S. officials on both sides of the aisle, including the Passover firebombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion targeting Gov. Josh Shapiro. “[Cody] Balmer had pleaded guilty in mid-October, not just to arson and terrorism but to attempted murder. But Shapiro was still reluctant to focus on his attacker. ‘The prosecutor felt it was important to introduce into evidence the bomber’s claims that he did that because of “what I did to the Palestinians,” so clearly there was some motivation because of my faith,’ Shapiro said. ‘But I think it is dangerous for you or anyone else to think about those who perpetrate these violent attacks as linear thinkers, meaning that they have a left-wing ideology or a right-wing ideology, or that they have a firm set of beliefs the way you might or I might. These are clearly irrational thinkers. And I think that’s true of others who have claimed lives, whether it’s [Minnesota] Speaker [Melissa] Hortman’s or Charlie Kirk’s.’” [NewYorker]

Bearing Arms: The Atlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker reports on Germany’s moves to rebuild its offensive military capabilities amid concerns over increased Russian aggression on the Continent and moves by Washington toward neo-isolationism. “[Colonel Dennis] Krüger told me about traveling to Tel Aviv to fine-tune a missile-defense system purchased from the Israelis that can intercept and destroy long-range ballistic missiles in space. … For decades, Germany has been a top exporter of arms to Israel, its commitment to the security of the Jewish state a legacy of the Holocaust. Arrow 3, the largest defense deal in Israeli history, reverses that logic by making Israel a guarantor of German safety. Krüger said that work on the weapons system turned representatives from the two militaries into a ‘family,’ and that they built camaraderie when his staff waited out missile attacks in Tel Aviv’s belowground shelters with their Israeli counterparts. The weapons acquisition from Israel is ‘one next step,’ Krüger said, ‘in overcoming our history.’” [TheAtlantic]

Word on the Street

Following a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump called on Jerusalem to “maintain a strong and true dialogue with Syria” and warned Israel to avoid scenarios “that will interfere with Syria’s evolution into a prosperous State”…

U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, the U.S.’ Syria envoy, met in Damascus on Monday with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa in an effort to calm tensions between Syria and Israel following weekend clashes…

Politico looks at concerns among Republican Jewish donors over increasing antisemitism on the right…

Sam Altman’s OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Josh Kushner’s Thrive Holdings and will integrate its AI tools into Thrive’s companies, which were acquired with an eye toward consolidating them and incorporating AI into their processes; Thrive had previously invested billions of dollars in OpenAI… 

Private equity firm Apax Partners acquired Israeli online marketplace Yad2 for $950 million…

Harvard hired a recent divinity school graduate who was filmed in late 2023 assaulting a Jewish student at a “die-in” at the Cambridge campus…

The New York Times spotlights Eli Zabar’s egg salad sandwich…

Israeli filmmaker Rachel Elitzur interviews religious Jewish couples about their first night of marriage in her short documentary “The First Night”…

The Norwegian government is struggling to reach a consensus on issues regarding oil drilling and Oslo’s sovereign wealth fund’s investments in Israel in its draft budget for the coming year ahead of a vote scheduled for Friday…

A synagogue and memorial in Rome to a 2-year-old Jewish victim of terror were vandalizedearlier this week, drawing condemnations from the city’s Jewish community and Italy’s foreign minister, who called the vandalism “unacceptable”…

Colombia expelled more than two dozen members of the Lev Tahor sect, including 17 children, after a raid on the hotel in which they were staying…

Israel’s Iron Beam system, which intercepts missiles with lasers, will be delivered to the IDF for initial operational use at the end of the month, Brig.-Gen. (res.) Daniel Gold, head of the Israeli Ministry of Defense Research and Development Directorate, said at the International DefenseTech Summit at Tel Aviv University on Monday, Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov reports… 

Iran sentenced award-winning filmmaker Jafar Panahi to a year in prison in absentia; Panahi, whose “It Was Just an Accident” won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, is currently in the U.S. promoting the film…

The Sudanese Armed Forces offered Russia a 25-year naval base deal along the East African coast that, if Moscow accepts, would be its first position in Africa…

Pic of the Day

Apollo Global Management CEO and UJA-Federation of New York Board Chair Marc Rowan was honored with the Gustave L. Levy Award last night at the 50th UJA-Federation Wall Street Dinner in Manhattan.

Referencing New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s comments regarding the recent protests outside an aliyah event at the Park East Synagogue, Rowan declared Mamdani an “enemy” of the Jewish community, vowing that his organization would “call him out.” 

Read more from eJewishPhilantropy’s Nira Dayanim here.

Birthdays

Actress best known for playing Special Agent Kensi Blye in 277 episodes of CBS’ “NCIS Los Angeles,” Daniela Ruah turns 42… 

Former director of the Mossad and then head of the Israeli National Security Council, Efraim Halevy turns 91… Professor of rabbinic literature at Yeshiva University’s Gruss Institute in Jerusalem, Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff turns 88… Real estate executive and founder of the Sunshine Group, she was an EVP of The Trump Organization until 1985, Louise Mintz Sunshine turns 85… Sociologist and human rights activist, Jack Nusan Porter turns 81… Partner at Personal Healthcare LLC, Pincus Zagelbaum… Former drummer for a rock band in France followed by a career in contemporary Jewish spiritual music in Brooklyn, Isaac “Jacky” Bitton turns 78… EVP at Rubenstein Communications, Nancy Haberman… Author of more than 15 volumes of poetry, he is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Bob Perelman turns 78… French historian, professor at Sorbonne Paris North University and author of 30 books on the history of North Africa, Benjamin Stora turns 75… Retired associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Barbara A. Lenk turns 75… Professor emerita at Montana State University, she was a member of the Montana House of Representatives and a board member of Bozeman’s Congregation Beth Shalom, Dr. Franke Wilmer turns 75… Canadian fashion designer and entrepreneur, he is best known for launching the Club Monaco and Joe Fresh brands, Joe Mimran turns 73… Partner in the Madison, Wis., law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland, she is a class action and labor law attorney, Sarah Siskind… Rabbi of Baltimore’s Congregation Ohel Moshe, Rabbi Zvi Teichman… Celebrity physician and author of diet books, he is the president of the Nutritional Research Foundation, Joel Fuhrman turns 72… Advertising account executive at the Los Angeles Daily Journal Corporation, Lanna Solnit… Cleveland resident, Joseph Schlaiser… Emmy Award-winning actress, Rena Sofer turns 57… Publisher and CEO of The Forward, Rachel Fishman Feddersen… Identical twin sisters, known as The AstroTwins, they are magazine columnists and authors of four books on astrology, Tali Edut and Ophira Edut turn 53… Lecturer of political science at Yale, she was formerly a White House staffer, Eleanor L. Schiff turns 49… Television writer and producer, Murray Selig Miller turns 49… Former member of the Knesset and then Israel’s ambassador to the U.K., Tzipi Hotovely turns 47… Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, Annie Fixler… Managing director with Alvarez & Marsal in Atlanta, she was a sabre fencer at the 2004 Summer Olympics, Emily Jacobson Edwards turns 40… Actor, best known for playing Trevor in the coming-of-age film “Eighth Grade,” Fred Hechinger turns 26…

Julie Menin, a moderate Jewish Democrat from Manhattan who last week declared an early victory in the New York City Council speaker race, is widely expected to serve as an ideological counterweight to the incoming administration of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist hoping to advance a range of far-left agenda items.

Some of their biggest clashes could stem from their sharply opposing views on Israel and antisemitism.

Menin, who would be the Council’s first Jewish speaker if officially elected in January during an internal vote, is an outspoken supporter of Israel and visited the country on a solidarity trip months after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Menin, 58, has advocated for Holocaust education funding and warned of rising antisemitism as a three-term city councilwoman.

For his part, Mamdani, a 34-year-old Queens state assemblyman, has long been a detractor of Israel — whose right to exist as a Jewish state he has refused to recognize. He has said that he will not participate in the Israel Day parade up Fifth Avenue, which Menin regularly attends, and indicated that he could move to enact some policies aligning with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting the Jewish state, even as he has also promised to protect Jewish New Yorkers by calling for a major increase in funding to prevent hate crimes, among other measures.

Their diverging approaches to such issues were on display late last month, when Menin and Mamdani each shared contrasting statements responding to a demonstration outside of a synagogue in her district during an event about immigration to Israel. 

While Mamdani admonished the synagogue for promoting “activities in violation of international law,” a comment he revised after facing backlash, Menin condemned the protest as “not acceptable,” saying “congregants must have the right to worship freely and to enter and exit their house of worship without impediment.”

Jewish community leaders suggested that Menin, whose district includes a wide swath of the Upper East Side, could find herself at odds with Mamdani if he chooses to act on some of his campaign pledges that raised red flags among pro-Israel advocates. The mayor-elect has said, for instance, he intends to revoke the city’s embrace of a working definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He has also indicated he will reassess the partnership between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion, potentially kicking the joint Cornell Tech campus out of its home on Roosevelt Island, which sits in Menin’s district.

A spokesperson for Menin said that she was not available for an interview with Jewish Insider on Monday. 

In a recent conversation with Errol Louis of NY1, Menin defended the Cornell-Technion partnership, saying that it has “created thousands and thousands of tech jobs.”

“I was just there last month. They’ve created hundreds of new tech companies, innovative tech companies that are now housed in New York City, that are really the future of our great city,” Menin added. “I think, look, we need to really try to come together on these issues, and I think it’s absolutely possible to do so.”

One Jewish leader close to Menin, who spoke with JI on condition of anonymity to address a sensitive issue, said that “the community sees her as a check and a safeguard” against Mamdani’s administration and that she “understands the historical importance of this moment,” as she is poised to become the first Jewish speaker. “She is a proud Jewish woman who represents a proud Jewish district.”

Still, the Jewish leader noted, Menin is “not the type to look for any fights,” stressing she is more likely to first seek common ground on divisive issues, unless she has “no choice but to push back.”

In recent public statements, Menin has struck a collaborative tone in regard to Mamdani, who will be the city’s first Muslim mayor, stressing their shared focus on affordability goals such as universal childcare, one of the mayor-elect’s top priorities.

Menin announced last week that she had secured enough backing to become the next speaker, touting votes from at least 36 members of the council. Though allegiances could shift in the coming weeks, Menin, who added endorsements Monday, is not expected to fall below the minimum threshold of 26 votes required to win in the 51-seat body. Her chief rival, Crystal Hudson, a progressive from Brooklyn who was seen as more closely aligned with Mamdani’s agenda, conceded the race last week.

In a statement last Wednesday, Menin, who did not make an endorsement in the mayoral race, said she was “honored and humbled by the trust and faith that my colleagues have put in me to lead the City Council as a force of action for New York families.”

“With this broad five-borough coalition, we stand ready to partner with Mayor-Elect Mamdani’s administration and deliver on a shared agenda that makes New York more affordable through universal child care, lowers rent and health care costs and ensures that families across the city can do more than just get by,” she continued.

A spokesperson for Mamdani, who did not publicly take sides in the speaker race, did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for the mayor-elect, said in a statement last week that Mamdani “looks forward to working with her and the entire City Council to deliver on our affordability agenda for New Yorkers.”

Lynn Schulman, a Jewish councilwoman from Queens and an ally of Menin, said she believed her colleague “will be an excellent speaker” and “fair to everybody,” especially as she prepares to negotiate a massive, $116 billion budget. 

“The Council is made up of a very broad and diverse group,” she told JI. “I think that there is going to be a lot of collaboration. Julie is someone who’s always brought a lot of people together. We have to work as a collegial body.”

Sydney Altfield, CEO of Teach Coalition, an Orthodox advocacy group, said that she was “encouraged” that Menin locked up a super majority among council members, adding that she had “worked closely” with the likely speaker and trusts “she is someone who can turn policy into progress.” 

“As New York moves forward with a Muslim mayor, a Catholic governor and now the potential of a Jewish council speaker, we have the chance to see something powerful,” Altfield said in a statement to JI. “Leaders from every faith standing shoulder to shoulder for our children.”

Despite looming tensions over Israel, Sara Forman, executive director of New York Solidarity Network, a local pro-Israel group, said it was “premature” to speculate about any possible friction with Mamdani, focusing instead on how Menin is poised to become the first Jewish speaker — which she called “hugely significant in this moment” of rising antisemitism.

“It gives the community some reassurance moving forward that there’s somebody just like us,” Forman said.

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, rolled out an extensive list of more than 400 new transition team appointees on Monday, saying the picks would help “recruit top talent and develop smart policy” on such issues as housing, community safety and economic development.

Despite the wide diversity of his choices, some of the appointees have raised concerns among Jewish leaders who remain skeptical of the mayor-elect and his commitment to fighting antisemitism, especially in moments where anti-Israel sentiment can cross a line into overt bigotry against Jews.

Among the most controversial sources of criticism was Mamdani’s appointment of Tamika Mallory, a former Women’s March leader who stepped down from its board amid allegations of antisemitism, to a newly established community safety committee.

Mallory, who rose to prominence as a leading organizer of the Women’s March after President Donald Trump was first elected, resigned from her role as a co-chair of the organization after facing accusations of having made virulently antisemitic remarks, including a widely discredited claim that Jewish people had played a major part in the slave trade.

The assertion echoed an infamous tract published by the Nation of Islam, whose antisemitic leader, Louis Farrakhan, Mallory had also praised as “the GOAT,” or “greatest of all time,” on social media. 

In a statement to Jewish Insider on Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League, which launched an online tool to monitor policies and personnel choices of the incoming administration, called Mallory “simply the wrong choice for a committee on community safety” and said that she has “made some highly insensitive remarks about Jews and money, which play directly into antisemitic tropes,” while aligning “herself with people like notorious antisemite Louis Farrakhan.”

“Given the fact that New York’s Jewish community is facing antisemitism and security threats at unprecedented levels, the mayor-elect needs to appoint someone who will unite, rather than divide, communities.” the ADL spokesperson said.

In 2020, Mamdani called on social media for Mallory to be released from custody after she and others were arrested during a social justice demonstration in Kentucky. Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist and former Women’s March leader who also has espoused antisemitic rhetoric, has long been an ally of Mamdani, but was not appointed to a role on any of his transition committees.

Monica Klein, the communications director for Mamdani’s transition, said in a statement shared with JI on Tuesday that the newly announced “subcommittees are preparing to implement Mayor-elect Mamdani’s agenda of safety and security for Jewish New Yorkers and everyone else who calls this city home, including his pledge for an 800% increase in anti-hate crime prevention.”

Mallory did not respond to a request for comment.

After the appointees were publicized Monday, Jewish leaders were scouring the lists in group chats and private texts for signs of how the newly elected mayor, a democratic socialist and staunch critic of Israel, would approach issues of concern to the community.

“There are a lot of bad names,” one Jewish leader told JI, sharing screenshots of exchanges flagging some transition picks seen as problematic, such as an anti-Zionist rabbi and activists affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, which is pushing Mamdani to divest from Israel when he takes office.

Other appointees who drew scrutiny were Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College who has called for an end to policing and will advise on community safety. 

The list included a number of outspoken detractors of Israel. Tahanie Aboushi, a civil rights lawyer and a former candidate for Manhattan district attorney who, like Mamdani, has endorsed boycotts against the Jewish state, will provide input on legal affairs. Lumumba Bandele, a member and organizer of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement who is joining the community organizing team, has frequently accused Israel of genocide as well as apartheid, while calling Zionism “a crime against humanity,” among several other incendiary social media comments.

The tolerance of such heated rhetoric underscores how Mamdani’s election upended the conventional thinking that a winning candidate in New York — a place with the largest Jewish community of any city in the world — must show strong support for Israel, emboldening like-minded allies who are now poised to shape the administration. 

Still, some Jewish leaders were encouraged that Mamdani had chosen Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, to join an emergency response committee, despite his past criticism of the mayor-elect’s views on Israel.

Potasnik, who was recently named the first chief chaplain of the New York City Police Department, said he had “no specifics” to share about his role at the moment, noting that Mamdani’s representatives advised new appointees to direct any press requests to the transition team. 

“There are going to be meetings discussing what we’re expected to do,” Potasnik told JI broadly. “I just think that it’s important to have constructive engagement discussing important issues impacting our lives in New York.”

Potasnik was a member of outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’ transition team, which featured more than 700 members and leaned heavily on the Orthodox community.

Mamdani, for his part, named a handful of rabbis to join his transition team, including Abby Stein, a top Jewish ally who identifies as an anti-Zionist and will advise on health issues, and Rachel Timoner, who is the leader of Congregation Beth Elohim, a Brooklyn Reform synagogue that hosted a discussion with the mayor-elect during the campaign. She is serving on the immigrant justice committee.

In addition to clergy members, Mamdani tapped a pair of former Jewish lawmakers, Helen Rosenthal and Ruth Messinger, and community activists such as Masha Pearl of the Blue Card Fund, a nonprofit providing financial support for Holocaust survivors. 

Rabbi Marc Schneier, a critic of Mamdani, spoke with the mayor-elect late last week after protesters had demonstrated outside Park East Synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation in Manhattan led by his father. 

He said that Mamdani — who had drawn backlash over his initial statement on the protest, which he revised this week — voiced interest in learning more about legislation to bar demonstrations from taking place outside houses of worship.

But while Schneier was encouraged that Mamdani had been receptive to his recommendation, he told JI that he did “not see things changing” with respect to other key issues, such as the mayor-elect’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

“If he continues to encircle himself with people who are going to support his limited understanding of Israel,” he said, “then we’re going to have a problem here.”