(JTA) — When Zohran Mamdani’s first TV ad of the general election went live last week, the first person viewers saw was an 83-year-old Jewish woman from the Upper West Side.

Rosalind Petchesky, a retired political scientist and progressive activist, has become a recurring star of Mamdani’s social media video campaign, which is widely seen as crucial to vaulting him from a local politician in Queens to the frontrunner for mayor.

“I used to love New York,” Petchesky says at the beginning of the 30-second spot. “But now, it’s just where I live.”

The ad then shifts to a hopeful tone centered around Mamdani’s message of affordability, with the title, “Things Can Change.”

The real-life Petchesky says the sentiment didn’t actually resonate with her. “I kept thinking, ‘I wouldn’t say I used to love New York. I still love New York! I never didn’t love New York,’” she said, laughing, in an interview. 

But she said she was not bothered that a second, more hopeful line she’d initially spoken — “But now, I feel like everything’s starting to change” — had ended up on the cutting-room floor.

“I think they must have decided the positive part was going to be done by Zohran, so they didn’t need that,” Petchesky said. “To me, it’s just another way of helping the campaign. And they want me to do something? I do it.”

How did Petchesky come to be a loyal volunteer for Mamdani, a half-century her junior? As with many of Mamdani’s earliest Jewish supporters, the answer lies in opposition to Israel.

Petchesky is a longtime critic of the country, since she first visited as a teenager in 1959. Active for the last decade in Jewish Voice for Peace, the anti-Zionist organization, she first met Mamdani in May 2023 when she and other JVP members travelled to the state legislature in Albany to lobby for his Not On Our Dime Act. The legislation, which failed to advance, proposed blocking New York nonprofits from supporting Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Petchesky has been involved with JVP since retiring from teaching at Hunter College in 2013. During her scholarly career, Petchesky earned a MacArthur Fellowship (known as the “genius award”) in 1995, and became recognized as a “leading theorist on international reproductive rights.” A feminist activist and thinker, Petchesky’s work has dovetailed with the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 2021 she co-edited the book, “A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism.”

After meeting Mamdani in Albany, Petchesky said the pair had “a number of encounters that were fascinating and fun” in the following months. 

Mamdani posted a photo of the two linking arms at a demonstration on Oct. 13, 2023, less than a week after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, calling on Sen. Chuck Schumer to support a ceasefire. The pair were among the 60 New Yorkers arrested that night for blocking traffic outside Schumer’s home.

“Rosalind Petchesky is an 81-year old Jewish New Yorker who deeply inspires me,” Mamdani wrote in his post about that night. 

“As we sat handcuffed on the bus to the police precinct, Ros told me that she’d been away from home for two weeks and had only gotten back that day,” he wrote. “She was supposed to be at home that night eating dinner with her partner, but she decided she couldn’t be at home when we were on the brink of genocide.”

A few months later, Mamdani and Petchesky appeared on the “Laura Flander & Friends” podcast together, along with JVP member Jay Saper. The episode, titled “Organizing for Ceasefire Through Policy & Protest: Meet the People of JVP & NY Assemblymember Mamdani,” focused on JVP’s and Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian activism and their efforts with the Not On Our Dime Act.

Petchesky spoke about the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, including through a feminist lens, saying she sees “Israeli persecution of Palestinians as a form of reproductive injustice and attack on families.” She also spoke about Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed on Oct. 7, 2023 when Hamas attacked and killed over 100 people at her home community, Kibbutz Be’eri. 

“Vivian Silver was amazing,” Petchesky said. “She actually helped ferry Palestinian children from Gaza to hospitals in Israel. She worked with Gazans. … It’s horrible that she was killed and we don’t know for sure whose bombs killed her.”

By the time Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign in October 2024, the two had formed a “deep bond of trust,” Petchesky said — enough so that he asked her to be in his announcement video. 

“I’ll make buses fast and free,” Mamdani says in the video. “So I can just get where I’m going,” Petchesky says defiantly.

“He called me up at home and said, ‘We’re gonna send a car for you. We want you to come to Astoria and be in this video,’” Petchesky recalled.

She added, “He wanted an old lady to talk about buses. And I’m the person he first thought of, because he knew me.”

Petchesky said she’s most excited to see Mamdani bring together Black, Asian, Latinx and Jewish activists to “stand up to Trump and ICE”; to make a rent freeze happen; and to instate free buses for all New Yorkers — the democratic socialist candidate’s most prominent pledges. But it’s clear that her vision around Israel also overlaps with Mamdani’s — and while some critics say Mamdani’s stances on Israel amount to antisemitism, Petchesky countered that those accusations discount the segment of Jews who share Mamdani’s views.

“There’s a big split in what’s called the Jewish community — there’s no single Jewish community,” she said. “There’s many.”

Petchesky’s own Jewish story involved a decades-long breach — and a return through her involvement with JVP.

During the podcast with Mamdani, Petchesky spoke about her experience growing up in an observant Jewish family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before recoiling from Judaism after witnessing racism during a 1959 trip to Israel. 

She expanded on that experience in a recent interview. She said she sang in the temple choir with her mother but became disaffected after returning from Israel and sharing what she’d witnessed. A local rabbi dismissed her concerns, she said. 

“I was very angry, and when I went to college I said, ‘I’m done, I’m not going to synagogue anymore, these people are hypocrites, I have nothing to do with it,’” said Petchesky, who was involved in civil rights advocacy at the time. “I was young, you know, I was just angry.”

After decades of being disconnected from Judaism, Petchesky said she accompanied a grieving friend to a service at B’nai Jeshurun, a non-denominational synagogue on the Upper West Side. Petchesky said she began attending more regularly; she was a fan of the rabbi, and felt particularly moved by the music. 

But she stopped attending when she felt the rabbi at the time did not take a strong stance against the Iraq War. After a few years of unsuccessfully trying other places (“They were all, what I would say is too Zionist, they were supporting Israel”), she was introduced to JVP in 2013. 

“I felt, after all those years and decades, I had found my political home,” said Petchesky, who attends services at Kolot Chayeinu, the progressive synagogue where Mamdani and City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is a member, attended a Rosh Hashanah service. (Lander has joked that Kolot Chayeinu is a place where JVP Jews and J Street Jews come together, with “minimal side-eye.”)

About a decade after finding her political home with JVP, Petchesky’s path became intertwined with Mamdani’s. And when JVP’s political branch organized a celebratory “Jews for Zohran” event this August, following his primary victory, Mamdani gave Petchesky a shoutout while speaking to the crowd of more than 150.

“It is lovely to see so many of you,” Mamdani said before singling out Petchesky. “It is lovely to see the star of our launch video, who is right here, who ‘just wants to get where she’s going.’” 

Petchesky was just one of Mamdani’s many Jewish allies at the event, but her shoutout drew a big applause.

“I don’t know, I mean we kind of bonded,” Petchesky said of her and Mamdani. “I think he’s just fond of me — you know, little old Jewish lady who gets arrested.”

Unlike with her comment in the new ad, Petchesky said her role in the campaign announcement video has resonated with her more as time has passed.

“At the time I thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’” she said. “And between that video and now, I’m realizing that will really help me. I mean I stood and waited 15 minutes the other day for the bus. I finally did sit down, but it was very hard.”

She added, “I almost did yell out on the bus, ‘People! Vote for Zohran because we’ll have free fast buses!”

The post Meet the 83-year-old Jewish activist who stars in Zohran Mamdani’s campaign ads appeared first on The Forward.

Israel delayed aid into Gaza and kept the enclave’s border shut on Tuesday, while re-emergent Hamas fighters demonstrated their grip by executing men in the street, darkening the outlook for US President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war.

Three Israeli officials said Israel had decided to restrict aid into the shattered Gaza Strip and delay plans to open the border crossing to Egypt at least through Wednesday, because Hamas had been too slow to turn over bodies of dead hostages. The militant group has said locating the bodies is difficult.

Meanwhile, Hamas has swiftly reclaimed the streets of Gaza’s urban areas, following the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops last week.

In a video circulated late on Monday, Hamas fighters dragged seven men with hands tied behind their backs into a Gaza City square, forced them to their knees and shot them from behind, as dozens of onlookers watched from nearby shopfronts.

A Hamas source confirmed that the video was filmed on Monday and that Hamas fighters participated in the executions. Reuters was able to confirm the location by visible geographic features.

DELAY IN HANDING OVER BODIES

Trump has given his blessing to Hamas to reassert some control of Gaza, at least temporarily. Israeli officials, who say any final settlement must permanently disarm Hamas, have so far refrained from commenting publicly on the reemergence of the group’s fighters.

On Monday the US president proclaimed the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” to Israel’s parliament, as Israel and Hamas were exchanging the last 20 living Israeli hostages in Gaza for nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners.

But so far, Hamas has handed over only four coffins of dead hostages, leaving at least 23 presumed dead and one unaccounted for, still in Gaza.

Aid trucks have yet to be permitted to enter Gaza at the full anticipated rate of hundreds per day, and plans have yet to be implemented to open the crossing to Egypt to let some Gazans out, initially to evacuate the wounded for medical treatment.

HAMAS RETURN DEMONSTRATES HURDLES TO SETTLEMENT

The highly public return of Hamas to control of Gaza’s streets demonstrates the hurdles to progressing from the initial ceasefire – phase one of Trump’s plan – to a permanent settlement that would prevent a new eruption of fighting.

Gaza residents said Hamas fighters were increasingly visible on Tuesday, deploying along routes needed for aid deliveries.

Palestinian security sources said dozens of people had been killed in clashes between Hamas fighters and rivals in recent days.

Hamas accused Israel of violating the ceasefire. The Israeli military said it had fired on people who crossed truce lines and approached its forces after ignoring calls to turn back.

A summit co-hosted by Trump in Egypt on Monday ended with no public announcement of major progress towards establishing an international military force for Gaza, or a new governing body.

HAMAS ASSERTS CONTROL

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently maintained that the war cannot end until Hamas gives up its weapons and ceases to control Gaza, a demand that the fighters have rejected, torpedoing all previous peace efforts.

But Trump, having announced that the war is now over, said on Monday Hamas still had a temporary green light to keep order.

“They do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he said.

Hamas sources told Reuters on Tuesday the group would tolerate no more violations of order in Gaza and would target collaborators, armed looters and drug dealers.

The group, though greatly weakened after two years of pummeling Israeli bombardment and ground incursions, has been gradually reasserting itself since the ceasefire took hold.

It has deployed hundreds of workers to start rubble clearing on key routes needed to access damaged or destroyed housing and to repair broken water pipes. Road clearance and security provision will also be needed for increased aid delivery.

AID AND HOSTAGES

The ceasefire has stopped two years of devastating warfare in Gaza triggered by the October 7, 2023 attack in which Hamas-led terrorists killed around 1,200 people and seized 251 hostages.

Swathes of Gaza are in ruins and the global hunger monitor said in August there was famine in the territory. Thousands of Gazans have been returning to homes since the ceasefire, many finding whole streets bombed into dust.

UNICEF spokesperson Tess Ingram said that while aid was getting into Gaza with tents, tarpaulin sheets, winter clothes, family hygiene kits and other critical items, she hoped for a significant increase later this week.

What caught Nim Shapira’s eye when videos of New Yorkers tearing down posters of Israeli hostages began circulating in October 2023 wasn’t just the stark affront. It was also the poles the posters had been attached to.

“I recognized every corner,” he said. “This was my neighborhood.”

The filmmaker had never before turned his craft to his identity as an Israeli living in New York. But Shapira immediately began gathering footage about the posters — and about those who felt compelled to put them up, and to tear them down.

His resulting documentary, “Torn,” was first released last year, when about 100 Israelis were still held hostage, out of roughly 250 taken on . Now, with all living hostages released and Hamas agreeing to free the bodies of 28 deceased hostages, too, Shapira — who is entering “Torn” into awards consideration — says its message remains deeply relevant.

We spoke to Shapira on Monday in the hours after 20 hostages were released about what he learned about the poster wars and why his film is still essential viewing.

Sign up here to attend a virtual screening of “Torn” on Thursday at 7 p.m., followed by a conversation with Shapira and others involved in the poster wars in New York City.

JTA: Before Oct. 7, your work did not focus on your Israeli identity. Why did you feel you had to make this movie?

Shapira: I’ve always been vocal for peace. But then, Oct. 7 happened, and the people that were my friends stopped speaking to me because I’m Israeli. It’s like the old saying of: You are the people you’ve been waiting for. I just had to do it. I didn’t want to do this film, and I had to do it.

What did you learn about the people who were tearing down the posters? Were there moments where you felt like you understood what they were thinking?

That’s what I wanted to explore in the film. I don’t justify what they did, and I don’t respect it, but this is a documentary. It’s asking questions. It’s not a film funded by this organization or that organization, or this country, or that country. I’m asking for empathy, and if I’m asking for empathy, I should also have empathy for the other side, and I should also understand their motives.

I would say that the people that tore down the posters live on a spectrum. These were people from in their teens to people that are retired, every ethnicity, every background and every age group. And that’s what strikes me the most. There were so many people without skin in the game that joined this cause of taking down these posters.

Some people that tore down the posters did lose family members in Gaza because of Israeli airstrikes. Some people that tore down the posters — they didn’t read what was on the signs. They were told that this is Israeli propaganda funded by the government, and they thought that it needs to be removed. Some of them are college students that thought it was the cool thing to do. And some are antisemites.

So I don’t want to put a label on the entire group of people that turned out the posters, because there are different scenarios in which posters were torn. In any case, this was an attack on freedom of speech, and this was anti-American. And there are enough lampposts in New York to share their suffering as well.

What do you hope viewers will take away from seeing “Torn”?

Empathy is all about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. I honestly don’t think that people can put themselves in other people’s shoes, because you can never know what another person is going through, but you can step outside of your own shoes for a quick moment. So that’s all I’m asking.

I’m asking for the people who put on the posters to think about these victims and hostages that did nothing wrong. And I’m also asking for understanding from, let’s say, my side, to understand that the number-one reason why people read down the posters is that the death toll in Gaza kept rising throughout this war.

What has been most surprising about the reception?

I was able to have a film screened in Ivy League universities from Columbia to Harvard to Stanford to NYU. I’m very proud of that. I’m very proud that some of the screenings had people from the encampments. I spoke with American Muslims. I spoke with people from Jordan and from Egypt. I also spoke with Chinese and Venezuelans — I spoke to everyone who came to the screenings. I think maybe the most surprising thing was that there was a Q&A that I couldn’t come to — people just stayed in the theater and talked until the usher told them to leave.

Now there are good reasons to remove hostage posters — all of the living hostages are home. Why is your movie still worth seeing?

For two reasons. First, the hostage families with their loved ones still in Gaza — they are asking for us to stay in the fight. They still need us.

These hostages that were murdered, first kidnapped and then murdered — they are not just Israeli. They are American, and they are also from Nepal, Thailand and Tanzania. They are Christian and Muslim and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews. People from all religions are captive right now because their only sin was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and their families deserve to bring them home for a proper burial.

But also, my film is not about Israel or Palestine. My film is about New York and America. I’m dying for the day that the film will not be irrelevant, but we are more tribal and polarized than ever. We exist in different echo chambers and different silos. The poster war did not just tear down the posters, but also tore down the social fabric of the city. We are the most diverse city on the planet, so if we can’t sit down and talk to one another, what are we doing here? We have the biggest Jewish population. We have a huge Muslim population. Antisemitism is at a record high; there’s also Islamophobia that is rising.

But these are not just problems for the Jews or the Muslims. This is a societal problem and the film mostly asks questions. It asks: Can multiple things be true at the same time? Why is empathy a limited resource, and can we have disagreements without dehumanizations? So yes, the film is still much more relevant than ever.

—
The post With hostages home, the filmmaker behind ‘Torn’ says his documentary about NYC’s poster wars remains sadly relevant appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.