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Andrew Cuomo said antisemitism was his ‘most important issue.’ What does his record say?
At an Upper West Side synagogue in April, Andrew Cuomo pronounced “the most important issue” in his campaign for mayor of New York City: antisemitism.
The former governor has centered an appeal to Jewish New Yorkers as he seeks to defeat the race’s frontrunner, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a staunch critic of Israel. In the same speech at the West Side Institutional Synagogue, Cuomo declared a belief that has defined his attitude toward Israel and antisemitism for decades.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
Cuomo proceeded to lose the Democratic primary to Mamdani and relaunch his campaign as an independent in the general election. Now polling second but far behind Mamdani, he contends that his vow to defend Jews lies at the heart of his bid to lead the city with the largest Jewish population in the world. He himself has two Jewish brother-in-laws and a Jewish son-in-law who joined his family last year.
Here is a breakdown of Cuomo’s history, rhetoric and policies surrounding Jews, Israel and antisemitism.
(Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)
Tackling antisemitism
Cuomo has long touted deep ties to Jewish New Yorkers. In a 2002 interview with New York Jewish Week, he described being “raised in a community in Queens with Jewish people,” and he often references his Jewish in-laws.
While he was governor from 2011 to 2021, New York saw a string of attacks on Jews. In 2019 alone, those included assaults on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, the stabbing of five people at a rabbi’s house in Monsey, and a shooting that killed four people at a kosher supermarket just over the border in Jersey City.
Cuomo responded with several public measures. He formed a hate crimes unit in the state police, allocated $45 million to protect religious-based institutions and upped policing in Jewish neighborhoods. In 2020, he passed a law that made New York the first state to define “hate-fueled” murder as domestic terrorism, punishable by up to life in prison without parole.
During his mayoral bid, Cuomo has honed in on fighting antisemitism, often in the same breath as calling himself a stalwart supporter of Israel and a pillar against pro-Palestinian activism. He warned the crowd at the West Side Institutional Synagogue, “The forces of antisemitism and pro-Palestinian policies are organized, well funded and mobilized, and have significant political strength, even right here in the city of New York.”
At the center of Cuomo’s pitch to Jewish voters is the alternative of Mamdani, whom he has accused of “fueling antisemitism.” Mamdani says that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and supports a boycott against Israel. Cuomo says his opponent’s positions have contributed to a breeding ground for hatred and violence against Jews, while also acknowledging that Mamdani has many younger, pro-Palestinian Jewish supporters.
A long relationship with Israel
For decades, Cuomo has emphasized his “hyper aggressive” support for Israel. He visited during the 2014 Gaza War, touring a tunnel that Israel said was built by Hamas and expressing “total solidarity” with Israel.
In 2016, he passed a controversial order that banned state agencies from investing in companies and organizations that promoted or engaged in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. The order also required the state to create a public list of businesses aligned with BDS.
“If you boycott against Israel, New York will boycott you,” Cuomo said at the time. “If you divert revenues from Israel, New York will divert revenues from you. If you sanction Israel, New York will sanction you.”
The measure was praised by pro-Israel groups, who hold that BDS seeks to harm or destroy Israel. Critics, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the order infringed on First Amendment rights because boycotts are a form of free speech. Some activists also compared the public list of companies with McCarthyism. Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports BDS, protested outside Cuomo’s office.
In November 2024, Cuomo volunteered to join Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal defense against a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, which charged him with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Cuomo said at the time, “This is the moment that true friends stand up, shoulder to shoulder and fight for the State of Israel.” But by August, Cuomo said he had not been involved in defending Netanyahu since his mayoral campaign began.
During the mayoral primary, Cuomo criticized progressive candidates beyond Mamdani for their stances on Israel — including Brad Lander, the Jewish city comptroller and Netanyahu critic who cross-endorsed Mamdani. Cuomo accused Lander and City Council speaker Adrienne Adams of “aiding and supporting the most aggressive anti-Israel policies.”
Lander responded furiously at the West Side Institutional Synagogue, the same congregation where Cuomo spoke. “Somehow, we Jews have become political pawns,” said Lander. “See something or someone you don’t like? Call it antisemitism, in a cheap, craven attempt to lure in Jewish support.”
Andrew Cuomo speaks at the town hall hosted by UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council, in Midtown Manhattan, May 22, 2025. (Michael Priest Photography)
Clashing with Jews
Cuomo cultivated strong ties with Jewish leaders while he was governor, but some of those relationships hit rocky periods.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Cuomo restricted gatherings and closed schools in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. He singled the community out for spreading infections “because of their religious practices” during a press conference, setting off street demonstrations among Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn.
In response to the order limiting religious gatherings, Agudath Israel of America, which represents Haredi Orthodox Jews, filed a federal lawsuit claiming their civil and religious liberties were violated. Agdath won the suit in a 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cuomo also came under fire for allegedly disparaging an event celebrating Sukkot, when Jews gather under temporary huts often covered in tree branches, during his campaign for attorney general in 2006. He commented to his team, “These people and their f***ing tree houses,” according to The New York Times Magazine. His spokesperson denied the incident.
His friendship with Jews was also deeply tested by the sexual misconduct probe that toppled his governorship in 2021. A slew of Jewish Democrats called for his resignation, including party leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Jerry Nadler. So did several liberal and progressive Jewish groups, such as the New York Jewish Agenda and Jews For Racial & Economic Justice.
Andrew Cuomo speaks outside the West Side Institutional Synagogue, April 1, 2025, New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The Gaza war
Cuomo’s identification as one of Israel’s fiercest defenders has been complicated by the country’s increasingly unpopular war in Gaza.
Despite maintaining in September that he is “100% pro-Israel” and “the most aggressive governor in the country on behalf of Israel,” Cuomo now supplements his condemnations of Hamas with a call to end to the war that he indirectly acknowledges has devastated Gaza. His choice of words, referencing “the carnage every night on TV” and “horrific” violence, could be interpreted as sympathetic to the deaths of more than 66,000 Palestinians — though he never directly names them.
Cuomo has also placed more distance between himself and Netanyahu, whom he once sought to represent in court. “I never stood with Bibi,” he told The New York Times in September, saying that his legal argument was about the ICC’s jurisdiction and he had no alliance with the Israeli leader.
His shift in tone could reflect declining public opinion of Israel in the United States. Across the electorate, Quinnipiac polling shows an all-time low for sympathies with Israelis and an all-time high for sympathies with Palestinians. In New York City, a Times/Siena poll found that voters preferred Mamdani’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over any other candidate’s by a wide margin.
Still, Cuomo has not explicitly criticized Israel’s conduct. After appearing to say in August that he did not support “what the Israel government is doing vis-à-vis Gaza” and “Israel impeding humanitarian aid,” he quickly backed off. He was simply “airing what some people feel,” not giving his own personal opinion, he clarified to The New York Times.
In a recent interview with The Forward, Cuomo said his position on Israel “hasn’t shifted one iota.”
“We want three things: We want killing to stop, because it’s a matter of humanity. We want the hostages returned, and Hamas eliminated,” he said. “If you don’t eliminate Hamas, you accomplish nothing. This will happen again and again.” That, he added, was “the same thing that Israel wants.”
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The post Andrew Cuomo said antisemitism was his ‘most important issue.’ What does his record say? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election
There are two ways to look at the Oct. 7 attacks, and which way you do will determine, to a large degree, whether you want to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survive the next election.
The first view is that Oct. 7 proved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved. The second is that it proved the conflict cannot be allowed to remain unresolved.
These conclusions point in almost opposite directions, yet both begin with something Israelis learned, or thought they learned, from the same horrific day. One says there is no point trying to mollify the Palestinians, because hatred of Israel runs too deep. The other says that leaving millions of Palestinians indefinitely in their current condition will produce catastrophe again and again. The tragedy is that Oct. 7 supplied powerful evidence for both.
The first view is not without foundation. Even to Israelis (and people across the world) who have long sought a peaceful accommodation, it was shocking to see the sheer joy of the Hamas terrorists as they butchered families while filming their own barbarism, calling parents to brag, then dragging innocents into Gaza where crowds wildly cheered.
But the real shock was the support for this in the West Bank and Gaza – polls showed two-thirds to three-quarters of Palestinians approved – suggesting coexistence is impossible. Rarely have polls been more devastating. As a result, many Israelis lost sympathy for Palestinians and concluded that a cleansing inferno is required. The brutal war that followed certainly reflected that.
The second way to see Oct. 7 is that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored – that the situation of the Palestinians was so unacceptable that something terrible was bound to happen. Many Israelis have trouble accepting this, because it does not really explain Hamas, which would fight Israel in any case, even if it were led by a far-left government willing to hand over to it every inch of the West Bank and Gaza and divide Jerusalem. But it might explain why so many Palestinians – even ones not in denial about the facts – were prepared to support it.
This view also offers at least one reason why the propaganda war waged by Hamas and its supporters has been so successful. There are others – including antisemitism and an outright denial of Israel’s right to exist . But the fundamentally unacceptable situation of the Palestinians is a big one, to be sure.
The combination of these factors yielded stunning results and contributed to an unfair vilification of the country that continues to frustrate Israeli voters.
By Oct. 9, before Israel had even identified all its dead or invaded Gaza, accusations of “genocide” were already circulating online, then among activists, NGOs, academics and eventually governments. By Oct. 13, protests denouncing “genocide” took place in London. On Oct 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies held a symposium called “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”
Within weeks, South Africa accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, invoking the “crime of crimes,” a term most associated with the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Rwanda. “This libel is powered by a relentless campaign of indictment that engraves a lie into collective memory,” says Adam Fisher, one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, who has researched the propaganda campaign in detail.
When Israel’s military entered Gaza, it faced an enemy that had deliberately embedded weapons caches, command centers and rocket launchers in homes and crowded neighborhoods, including hospitals, schools, mosques and UN sites. Hamas fighters vanished into tunnels beneath civilian areas, turning every dead child, collapsed building and grieving parent into material for a global indictment of Israel on social media. The strategy was clear: maximize civilian suffering, isolate Israel internationally, weaken American Jewish support and ultimately erode U.S. backing.
The implication is that Oct. 7 was a response to Palestinian suffering. The suffering is real, but Hamas was never defending Palestinians. The Iran-backed jihadist group has long sought to destroy Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state, and its campaign of terrorism after the 1993 Oslo Accords helped destroy the peace process by driving Israelis to the right.
Still, none of this makes the pre-Oct. 7 reality acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live alongside some 500,000 Jewish settlers without equal rights, largely under military occupation, while extremist settlers have increasingly engaged in violence with the government and military often looking the other way. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endured a devastating Israeli-Egyptian blockade because Hamas ruled the Strip. It failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself while making civilian life miserable.
On Al Jazeera recently I was placed opposite a young Gazan named Ahmed Abo Askar, introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He said he had gone three days without eating, and looked like it. He hoped an aid flotilla might get through and then smuggle out his ailing father.
I tried to put things in perspective, explaining about Hamas and the need to be rid of it. Ahmed answered emotionally: “Israel, not Hamas, they are the ones who killed my sister, killed their children and their entire family on 6 November 2023. Not all of Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why it’s not entering? ‘It’s because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human in the end.”
Everything I said was true – but he won the argument anyway, because he was a decent person suffering. No history lesson trumps that.
The insane situation has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in parallel ways. The Palestinians – who are rooted in a conservative society disinclined to compromise – have been made, in large numbers, desperate enough to support a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which is truly genocidal against Jews.
As for Israelis, it has made huge numbers of them stop wanting to think seriously about Palestinians except through the lens of security and punishment. Some openly fantasize about expulsion. Empathy is viewed as naïve. Oct. 7 made Israelis a little crazy too – exactly per the plan of Hamas.
So the Israeli opposition — people deeply hostile to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition — is mostly afraid to touch the Palestinian issue at all in the campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election, preferring to focus on Netanyahu’s epic domestic failures. Politically, the calculation is correct.
That is where the two interpretations of Oct. 7 attach themselves to the choice Israelis face in this election. Netanyahu has spent much of his career arguing, in practice if not always explicitly, that the Palestinian problem can be managed rather than solved: Contain Gaza, maintain Israeli control of the West Bank, expand settlements, periodically use overwhelming force and resist international pressure for Palestinian statehood.
If the lesson of Oct. 7 is that Palestinian hostility is essentially immutable and territorial compromise merely brings the enemy closer, then Netanyahu’s basic worldview survives despite his catastrophic failure on Oct. 7. The answer is deterrence and permanent Israeli security control — not another attempt at political reconciliation.
Gadi Eisenkot, the main challenger on the center-left, is more complicated. He is hardly offering Israelis a new Oslo: He has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state in the near- or medium-term and says the old two-state formula is unrealistic after Oct. 7. But he has also opposed more West Bank settlements and other measures that would make eventual territorial separation impossible.And he has long warned against Israel sliding into a binational state.
The implication is less a peace plan than a direction: Preserve the possibility of separating Israelis and Palestinians, change the conditions that perpetuate the conflict, and leave open a political horizon even if nobody can presently say exactly when it nears and how it ends. In that sense, the choice is not between Netanyahu and a dove. It is between continuing to manage an apparently permanent conflict and a government that might at least begin trying to move toward a possible peace.
But if Israelis conclude that Palestinians only understand force – which, by the way, Hamas clearly doesn’t – we’re guaranteeing a death spiral. Such a problem left to fester, without any attempt to change the dynamic, will blow up again and again. So after the election, if Netanyahu and his destructive right wing coalition are mercifully gone, this will need to be addressed in new and creative ways.
Both views of Oct. 7 rest on a foundation of facts. The invasion and massacre – and the widespread support for it among Palestinians – simultaneously dismantled both the Israeli left’s confidence in Palestinian intentions, and the Israeli right’s belief that the Palestinian problem could be indefinitely managed.
But it also proved that distrust is not a policy. Israel can build fences, destroy armies, assassinate commanders and punish those who attack it. What it cannot do is make millions of Palestinians disappear. If there is no political answer to that reality, eventually there will be another violent one.
The post The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election appeared first on The Forward.
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Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium
(JTA) — Zach Bryan, one of the world’s most popular country artists, appeared onstage wearing a shirt that read “Free Palestine” on Saturday night at Gillette Stadium outside Boston.
The venue was at the center of the dispute between stadium owner Robert Kraft and rapper Macklemore, who was blocked from performing there after Kraft objected to statements and imagery from an earlier stop on the tour and a “broader history” that Kraft characterized as antisemitic.
Representatives for Bryan and Kraft did not respond to requests for comment.
Bryan, whose biggest hits include “Something in the Orange” and his Kacey Musgraves duet, “I Remember Everything,” broke a stadium attendance record with 73,538 people on hand, the stadium said in an X post.
Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, helped lead an effort by stadium owners to block Macklemore from performing at their venues as Ed Sheeran’s opening act. Sheeran tried to distance himself from the venue owners’ actions, but his backup band and other acts subsequently withdrew from the tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium appeared first on The Forward.
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Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion
(JTA) — Britain’s Green Party on Sunday adopted a policy equating Zionism with racism, a move that immediately drew condemnation from the Israeli government and sparked concerns among some Jewish party members and the broader Jewish community.
The motion has also caused divisions within the party itself, with leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, skipping the vote and the party’s five sitting members of parliament issuing a statement on the policy.
Passing with 1,022 votes to 813 votes at the left-wing party’s annual conference, the motion argues that Zionism as an ideology is racist as it promotes “ethnonationalism,” and “privileges one ethnic group on the basis of the subjugation of others.”
It also declares the Greens to be an “anti-Zionist party” and that Zionism, the movement to develop and protect a Jewish state in Israel, will be “treated as any other form of racism.”
The motion also supports the establishment of a “single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press statement, “Today, the Green Party in Britain ceased to act as a political party and became a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism. The Greens have adopted not only the green of Hamas, but also its ideology: the elimination of the State of Israel through armed struggle.”
“The shocking resolution adopted today legitimizes armed struggle, calls for a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ – meaning the destruction of the State of Israel – and labels as ‘racist’ the aspiration of the Jewish people for self-determination,” the ministry statement said, adding that it “goes far beyond the boundaries of legitimate political debate.”
The ministry called on other political parties in Britain, particularly the ruling Labour Party, to reject the resolution.
In a letter to Polanski ahead of the vote, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, Jewish Leadership Council and Community Security Trust said they had “acute concerns” about the motion and called on the party leaders to oppose it. They wrote that urgent action was needed to address growing antisemitism within the Green Party. Such a motion, they wrote, “fuels hatred of Jews.”
The five representatives of the Greens who sit in Parliament – MPs Ellie Chowns, Adrian Ramsay, Siân Berry, Carla Denyer and Hannah Spencer – issued a joint statement condemning the actions of the current Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but emphasizing, “We know there is no conflict between supporting the rights of Palestinians and the rights of Jewish people.”
A clause was proposed to protect Jewish Greens by clarifying that the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline” those affiliated with synagogues or other Jewish groups that describe themselves as Zionist. The clause was voted down.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion appeared first on The Forward.
