Zohran Mamdani. Photo: Ron Adar / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza during an interview with controversial streamer Hasan Piker, who has an extensive history of repudiating the Jewish state himself.

On Monday, Piker released a recorded interview with Mamdani, in which the pair discussed a litany of municipal issues ranging from housing to grocery prices. During the discussion, Piker asked Mamdani how he is “feeling” about Israel and whether he believes the Jewish state is “good [or] bad.”

Mamdani responded that Israel is doing “not well at all” and that “many New Yorkers” are “rightfully horrified by a genocide that they have seen over 16 months of.” He argued that Israel has denied Palestinians “universal human rights.”

“I think that any politics worth its salt has to be one that is universal that doesn’t draw an exception, and in this country, we’ve drawn exceptions for far too long, especially when it comes to the application of [human rights] to Palestinians,” Mamdani said. 

Mamdani then accused his mayoral opponent, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, of smearing activism for Palestinian human rights as “antisemitism.” He also accused Cuomo of “weaponizing” claims of antisemitism for political advantage. 

“I think that what’s so frustrating about this is he’s taking a real crisis of antisemitism in our city and he’s weaponizing it purely for personal gain,” Mamdani said, blasting Cuomo for attempting “to mischaracterize any New Yorker standing up to say that every single person deserves freedom and justice [of antisemitism.]”

Since jumping into the race for New York City mayor, Cuomo has attempted to draw a contrast with his opponents by positioning himself as a stalwart defender of Israel, repeatedly repudiating other candidates for showing insufficient support to the Jewish state. 

“It’s very simple: anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” Cuomo said during a speech at West Side Institutional Synagogue in Manhattan. 

Cuomo has also declared antisemitism as “the most serious and the most important issue” for his campaign and, “in many ways, the toughest issue facing the city of New York and the country.”

The New York City Police Department released data last week showing that Jews in the city were victims of more hate crimes in March than any other group. The data continues a trend that has persisted for several years and concurred with a rise in antisemitic incidents across the US.

Mamdani’s decision to agree to an interview with Piker may raise additional questions among Jewish New Yorkers regarding the firebrand progressive’s commitment to protecting the Jewish community. Piker, a streamer with an extensive history of castigating Israel as an “apartheid state” and rationalizing atrocities committed against its civilians, has defended antisemitic terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah as “resistance” organizations.

Meanwhile, Mamdani, a representative within the New York State Assembly, has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career. A self-described democratic socialist, he has both advanced state legislation seeking to punish Israel and has labeled the Jewish state’s defensive military operations in Gaza a “genocide.”

In 2021, Mamdani issued public support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement—an initiative which seeks to economically and diplomatically isolate Israel as the first step to its eventual destruction. That same year, he also called for prohibiting New York lawmakers from visiting Israel, asserting that “every elected [official] must be pressured to stand with Palestinians.” In May 2023, Mamdani advanced the “Not on our dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act,” legislation which would ban charities from using tax-deductible donations to aid organizations that work in the West Bank, accusing the Jewish state of “war crimes” against Palestinians. 

On Oct. 8, 2023, 24 hours following the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, Mamdani published a statement condemning “[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s declaration of war” and suggesting that Israel would use the terror attacks to justify committing a second “Nakba.” Many Palestinians and anti-Israel activists use the term “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

Mamdani then said that Israel can only secure its long-term safety by “ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.” Five days later, he further criticized Israel’s response to the Hamas-led massacres, saying that “we are on the brink of a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza right now.”

According to a recent poll from Data For Progress, Cuomo currently leads the New York City mayoral race with a commanding 39 percent of the vote. Mamdani sits in second place with 15 percent of the vote, according to the pollster.

The post NYC Mayoral Hopeful Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide’ in Gaza During Sit-Down Interview With Hamas Apologist first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Illustrative: Students are seen at an anti-Israel protest encampment at Stanford University. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.

The Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California allows Jewish students to be subjected to unconscionable levels of antisemitic bullying in and outside of the classroom, a new civil rights complaint filed by StandWithUs and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, both Jewish advocacy groups, alleges.

The 27-page complaint, filed with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), describes a slew of incidents that allegedly fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel set off a wave of anti-Jewish hatred across the US. SCUSD students, it says, graffitied antisemitic hate speech in the bathrooms, vandalized Jewish-themed posters displayed in schools, and distributed stickers which said, “F—k Zionism.” All the while, district officials enabled the behavior by refusing to investigate it and blaming victims who came forward to report their experiences, according to the complaint.

“SCUSD has allowed an egregiously hostile environment to fester for its Jewish and Israeli students in violation of its federal obligations and ethnical responsibility to create a safe educational space for all students,” Jenna Statfeld Harris, senior counsel and K-12 specialist at StandWithUs Saidoff Legal, said in a statement last week. “SCUSD leadership repeatedly disregards the rights of their Jewish and Israeli students. We implore the Office for Civil Rights to step in and uphold the right of these students to an inclusive education free from hostility toward their protected identity.”

StandWithUs and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition argue that it is time for OCR to rectify the situation itself by compelling district officials to observe Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in programs and activities that receive federal funding, and punish those who perpetrate antisemitic discrimination with impunity.

The complaint lists several examples of alleged anti-Jewish activity.  In February 2025, for example, Wilcox High School, an SCUSD institution, forced the Jewish Culture Club to cancel an event aimed at countering propaganda shared at a previous event held by the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Scheduled to feature Israeli lawyer Bar Yoshafat as keynote speaker, the talk was allegedly sabotaged by vandalism and a deluge of politicized complaints lodged by outside anti-Zionist groups which contended that allowing a pro-Israel figure to address students is inappropriate. SCUSD conceded to the pressure campaign despite ensuring just weeks earlier that the MSA event went ahead as planned, the complaint says.

More disturbing incidents followed, according to StandWithUs and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition. A Wilcox teacher allegedly berated a Jewish student, arguing that her name is not derived from Hebrew but Arabic. No known action was taken. At Peterson Middle School, the complaint notes, a group of students taunted a Jewish peer with slurs and later graffitied such phrases on school property across the campus. Similar rhetoric was shared on social media as well, in full view of the local community. Forced to address what had become a hostile climate after Jewish parents filed more complaints with district officials, SCUSD did not acknowledge the antisemitic nature of the incidents. It would only send “a generalized communication to families about bullying, harassment, and hate speech,” the complaint says.

Teachers were emboldened by the district’s reluctance to protect the civil rights of Jewish students, the complaint continues. One Wilcox High School teacher went as far as showing a documentary produced in Turkey which compared the war in Gaza to the Holocaust. The graphic film at one point “displays a picture of a young Jewish child who was branded with a number by the Nazis during World War II and then suddenly shows an untraceable image of children with Arabic writing on their arms.” The teacher’s conduct violated numerous district policies and potentially state law, but she remains employed by the district to this day, according to the advocacy groups

“It is both shocking and heartbreaking that it has come to this,” Bay Area Jewish Coalition spokesman David Rosenberg-Wolf said. “After 1.5 years of continuous attempts to constructively address the situation to no avail, SCUSD Jewish students feel abandoned, leaving us no choice but to file this official complaint.”

Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to the latest data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.

The problem has led to civil rights complaints and lawsuits.

In September 2023, some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the SAUSD for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.

One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Hitler.

“While an increasing number of schools recognize that their Jewish students are being targeted both for their religious belief and due to their ancestral connection to Israel, and are taking necessary steps to address both classic and contemporary forms of antisemitism, some shamefully continue to turn a blind eye,” Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth L. Marcus said in March. “The law and federal government recognize Jews share a common faith and they are a people with a shared history and heritage rooted in the land of Israel. Schools that continue to ignore either aspect of Jewish identity are becoming dangerous breeding grounds for escalating anti-Jewish bigotry, and they must be held accountable.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post California Public School District Enables Antisemitic Bullying, New Civil Rights Complaint Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Edith Bruck, in white, attends the unveiling event for the AleXsandro Palombo mural “The Star of David” at the Shoah Museum in Rome, Italy, on April 7, 2025. Photo: Ariel Nacamulli

The Shoah Museum in Rome unveiled on Monday a second Holocaust-related mural that was recreated and acquired by the institution after being defaced by antisemitic vandals in Milan earlier this year.

The mural, titled “The Star of David,” depicts Italian-Hungarian Holocaust survivor, writer, and poet Edith Bruck, and was created by Italian contemporary artist aleXsandro Palombo. The artwork shows Bruck dressed in striped concentration camp prisoner uniform with an Israeli flag draped over her shoulders. Palombo debuted the mural in Milan in January, in honor of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, but mere days after its unveiling, the large blue Star of David on the Israeli flag was scrapped off by vandals and Bruck’s face with later defaced. Palombo has since recreated the mural, and it is now in display at the Shoah Museum.

The post Shoah Museum in Rome Acquires Another Defaced Mural of Holocaust Survivor first appeared on Algemeiner.com.