(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.