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Two Jewish Moral Worlds: What the Mamdani Election Reveals
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
When a single election lays bare a community’s conscience, it deserves more than punditry.
The recent victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York’s Democratic primary was more than a political surprise. It was a sociological revelation — a moment that exposed the moral divide within American Jewry and the fragility of its civic cohesion.
The Times of Israel exit poll tells the story plainly: roughly 63 percent of Jewish voters supported Andrew Cuomo, while a third backed Mamdani, the far-left candidate known for his fierce criticism of Israel and his support for the BDS movement. But the aggregate numbers obscure something more profound. Beneath the data lies a moral geography that splits the community itself; between Brooklyn’s progressive brownstones and Manhattan’s traditional bastions, between younger universalists and older particularists, between two rival moral languages of what it means to be Jewish in America.
In the brownstone belts of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Clinton Hill, Mamdani dominated. His margins in some precincts approached 90 percent. These are neighborhoods filled with young professionals, educators, and creatives: Jews who are largely non-Orthodox, highly educated, and politically left-leaning.
They belong to a generation whose moral formation occurred as much on social media as in synagogue pews. Across the East River, in Borough Park, Crown Heights, and the Upper East Side, Cuomo’s support exceeded 80 percent. These precincts are wealthier, older, and denser, with day-school graduates, Federation donors, and Israel mission alumni. One city, two moral worlds.
Political psychology offers a framework for understanding this divergence.
Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham’s Moral Foundations Theory describes human moral reasoning as rooted in several intuitive “foundations.” The first pair — Care and Fairness — orient toward empathy, equality, and the mitigation of harm. The second set — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — prioritize group solidarity, respect for tradition, and the protection of what is sacred.
Liberals, Haidt’s research found, tend to emphasize the individualizing foundations of care and fairness; conservatives draw upon all five, including those that bind the group together. These moral instincts operate beneath conscious ideology, shaping the stories people tell about justice, duty, and belonging.
Applied to Jewish life, this model illuminates the Mamdani divide. The younger, Park Slope cohort embodies the individualizing moral style. Their Judaism is ethical universalism — a faith of empathy, repair, and inclusion. To them, Jewish history teaches solidarity with the marginalized, not tribal defense. Their political commitments — tenant rights, climate action, anti-racism, and Palestinian solidarity — feel like moral extensions of their Jewish conscience.
Supporting Mamdani, in this light, is not an act of betrayal but an act of consistency. The Upper East Side cohort, by contrast, lives in the binding moral register. Their Judaism centers on loyalty to the Jewish people, reverence for institutions, and defense of Israel as a sacred trust. When a candidate denounces Israel as genocidal, they hear not critique but violation. The vote for Cuomo was not a calculation of interests; it was an affirmation of covenant.
Survey data confirm that these moral worlds align with generational and institutional divides. Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey found that only 45 percent of Jews under 35 hold a favorable view of Israel’s government, compared with 64 percent among those over 50.
Yet nearly 90 percent across all ages still view the Israeli people positively, suggesting alienation not from Israel itself but from its political expression.
Pew’s 2021 study showed that 58 percent of American Jews feel emotionally attached to Israel, though that attachment rises to 82 percent among the Orthodox and drops below 60 percent among Reform and unaffiliated Jews. Twenty-two percent now believe the United States is too supportive of Israel — twice the share in 2013 — and that sentiment is concentrated among younger and unaffiliated
Jews. Another 2024 survey by the Benenson Strategy Group found that nearly four in five American Jews still feel close to Israel, and 72 percent say Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, yet 62 percent admit they “sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel or its government.” The picture that emerges is not rejection but tension: enduring identity, waning confidence, moral ambivalence.
This moral bifurcation has deep civic consequences. For much of the 20th century, American Jews reconciled universal and particular obligations through robust institutions. Federations linked philanthropy for the poor to support for Israel. Synagogues fused civic virtue with covenantal belonging. Community centers cultivated the habits of service, dialogue, and shared space.
Those integrative structures made it possible to balance empathy and loyalty within a single communal framework. But as institutional participation has declined, moral formation now occurs in fragmented spaces — online, on campuses, within activist networks — where individual conscience replaces institutional mediation. The result is that empathy and loyalty, once twin pillars of Jewish civic life, now compete rather than complement.
When moral authority fragments, politics becomes identity by proxy. The universalist moral vocabulary of younger Jews often renders Jewish power suspect; the particularist vocabulary of their elders renders dissent heretical. The two sides no longer disagree over policy; they inhabit different moral cosmologies. That is why the Mamdani election felt seismic to the Jewish community and New York City more generally. It revealed, not created, the split between what might be called the “individualizing Jew” and the “binding Jew” — one who sees Judaism as a moral compass for humanity, the other who sees it as the covenantal anchor of a people.
The consequences are not merely internal. A cohesive Jewish community has long served as a vital civic intermediary, connecting minority experience to national ideals. Fragmentation weakens that role. When a third of Jewish voters champion a candidate who accuses Israel of genocide and two-thirds recoil in outrage, institutional consensus becomes nearly impossible. Jewish organizations struggle to articulate shared positions on campus speech, antisemitism, or Israel policy because the moral foundations beneath those debates differ.
The binding moral language of loyalty and sanctity, once the lingua franca of Jewish life, now strikes many younger Jews as exclusionary or even coercive. Yet without it, solidarity itself erodes.
This tension certainly mirrors the broader democratic malaise. Across the West, younger generations are shifting from binding to individualizing moral frameworks — from “who we are” to “whom we protect.” That shift, born of compassion, often dissolves the collective bonds that sustain civic trust. The Jewish community’s fracture is thus a microcosm of the American one. If one of the nation’s most institutionally successful minorities cannot sustain moral coherence across generations, the prospects for the larger democracy are sobering.
Still, Jewish tradition offers a path forward. The Hebrew Bible itself balances competing moral imperatives: love the stranger (Care), pursue justice (Fairness), remember you were slaves in Egypt (Loyalty), honor your parents (Authority), and be holy (Sanctity). The moral genius of Judaism has always been its capacity to integrate rather than choose. A renewed Jewish civic life would recover that synthesis — not by diluting conviction, but by translating between moral dialects.
Doing so requires moral bilingualism. Jewish leaders must learn to speak both the language of empathy and the language of obligation. They must show younger Jews that loyalty need not mean blind allegiance, and show older Jews that care need not mean disavowal. Institutions that can bridge those vocabularies — pairing service projects with Jewish learning, coupling justice work with covenantal memory — will thrive. Those that cannot will wither into echo chambers. The task is to rebuild spaces where the moral foundations overlap, where the passion for fairness coexists with respect for continuity, and where dissent strengthens rather than fractures community.
The Mamdani election dramatized the challenge. It showed that American Jews are not divided between left and right so much as between two moral imaginations.
The future of American Jewish life — and perhaps something of American civic life itself — depends on reuniting those halves. The task is not to pick sides between the moral foundations, but to recover their harmony. That would mean re-embedding compassion within community and rooting loyalty in moral reflection. It would mean building institutions capable of moral translation rather than moral policing. It would mean acknowledging that Jewish flourishing and democratic stability alike require both conscience and covenant.
The Mamdani election did not create this divide, it exposed it. The challenge now is whether American Jews can build a third moral script, one that joins care to continuity, justice to responsibility, empathy to endurance. That work begins by recognizing that not all differences are merely moral styles. Mamdani’s campaign trafficked in ideas that crossed into antisemitism — denying Jewish self-determination, vilifying Israel as inherently criminal, and normalizing hostility toward Jewish identity itself.
A community committed to moral dialogue cannot ignore such realities; tolerance cannot mean the abdication of judgment. Yet if Jews can still hold fast to both conscience and covenant — defending themselves without surrendering compassion, seeking justice without erasing solidarity — they can model for the nation how moral diversity becomes democratic strength. Democracy, like Judaism, survives not on unanimity but on the hard, often uncomfortable work of moral conversation and that work begins with the courage to confront hatred without forfeiting humanity.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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The White House cabinet is eating like your zayde
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hawking a new diet: sauerkraut. Yes, lacto-fermented cabbage. And it’s catching on with Trump’s cabinet, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Vice President JD Vance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are all heaping their plates with cabbage — apparently “drawn by the promise of slimmer waistlines and glowing skin.”
This claim may sound like it belongs in the marketing material for some sort of beauty product, or a scammy gas station supplement, rather than a jar of preserved vegetables. But RFK Jr. boasted that he lost 20 lbs in 30 days from eating mass amounts of the stuff. One might assume something like a tapeworm is responsible for such extreme weight loss — especially given Kennedy’s previous worm-related medical issues — but he asserts it’s all thanks to cabbage.
The diet, drawn up by one Dr. Sean O’Mara, an MD who advertises himself as an “executive biological consultant to high-performance leaders,” is apparently not just about sauerkraut; it includes other fermented vegetables, urges followers to also eat steak, snack on “old world cheese” and cut out alcohol and sugar.
Admittedly, this sounds like a fairly normal, low-carb diet. But sauerkraut is so core to the meal plan that members of the cabinet have taken to making their own, and carrying it around just to make sure they’re never without. Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, said on a podcast with Steven Miller’s wife, Katie, that she has had to refuse to stow a container of sauerkraut in her clutch when she and her husband go out for a nice evening. But, she said, he brings it anyway, presumably in his own bag. Or maybe tucked under his arm.
It’s hard to imagine anything more bubbie-coded than whipping out a jar of sauerkraut from a handbag while out at a nice dinner.
It’s not that Jews have some kind of patent on fermented vegetables; they exist in many cultures, like kimchi in Korea and miso in Japan. Sauerkraut specifically is common throughout European countries like Germany, Czechia and Russia.
But in the U.S., there’s a pretty strong association between Jews and pickles, whether they be sauerkraut or cucumbers, thanks to the deli culture imported with Jewish immigrants into the U.S. Jews created a pickle district on the Lower East Side, selling the preserved vegetables from pushcarts and spreading the food through the city. We’ve long been aware of the healthy gut biome effects of a lacto-fermented vegetable.
Ashkenazi food has long been made fun of for being gross — largely thanks to innovations like jarred gefilte fish, its beige-heavy color palette and, as the Wall Street Journal piece hinted at, the diet’s resulting gastrointestinal effects. Much of shtetl food culture was the result of hardship, and the need to preserve food through long winters, not an attempt for glowing skin and slim waistlines. The hardier the vegetable, the longer it lasted. Enter the cabbage. There are few foods less sexy than cabbage. (And I love cabbage.)
Which is why it’s so funny to see some of the most powerful men in the U.S. adopting the diet of a poor shtetl Jew — and doing so for aesthetic reasons.
There are a lot of weird diets and quasi-scientific buzzwords like “seed oils” and “clean protein” floating through the MAHA world that these American leaders often play to. But most of those, at least the ones promoted by men like Vance, have some cross-over focus on manliness and discipline — they’re about building muscle in some sort of primitive way. Think the carnivore diet or Kennedy’s obsession with beef tallow. Seeing these men turn to a diet I associate with my grandmother because they want to lose weight feels absurd, especially in the days of Ozempic for those with the funds to pay for it. Perhaps that does not have the right optics.
Of course, sauerkraut is nothing to be ashamed of. In recent years, Jews have been reclaiming pride in their food cultures; bespoke pickling classes have boomed. So the White House cabinet’s sauerkraut kick is really just them being really late to the shtetl chic trend. But you still should probably be ashamed of smuggling your own food into a nice restaurant, even if it’s sauerkraut.
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Chair of Britain’s largest arts center to step down amid antisemitism scrutiny
(JTA) — The chair of the United Kingdom’s largest arts institution will step down this fall following months of controversy over allegations of antisemitism and his social media activity related to Israel.
Misan Harriman, 48, the chair of the publicly funded Southbank Centre in central London that hosts millions of visitors per year, publicly stated earlier this week that he would not seek another term.
In a since-deleted social media post, Harriman stated on Monday that his departure had long been planned. “It’s semi-public knowledge that my term is coming to an end anyway,” he said, according to The Guardian. “I had decided way before this madness that I was going to do two terms.” He added, “I came on just after Covid, two terms, then handing the baton to whoever the next chairman will be. We will find out in due course, and of course, I am going to support that.”
The Southbank Centre said that it had been informed earlier in the year of Harriman’s decision.
In May, more than 64 MPs and peers wrote to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy asking the government to open an investigation into Harriman’s behavior, expressing concern that his public comments “have not been treated with sufficient scrutiny, particularly given their implications for public trust and community confidence,” in a publicly funded institution.
Nandy later confirmed that the Charity Commission and Arts Council England were examining complaints, alongside an internal review by the Southbank Centre.
Harriman, a photographer and self-described social activist, came to prominence in 2020, photographing a Black Lives Matter protest in London. He has overseen the Southbank Centre since 2021, but it’s only in recent months that he has faced increasing scrutiny over his public and social media comments, including referring to Israel as an “occupying power” and accusing the country of genocide.
In April, when two Jewish men were stabbed in the heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green in London, Harriman posted on social media about an alleged third victim who was Muslim. He wrote, “Wait, so there was a 3rd victim on the SAME DAY who was Muslim?! And our press isn’t reporting it? Even the Met Police didn’t mention the Muslim victim in its X post?! What is going on @metpolice_uk ?”
The Muslim victim did in fact receive coverage, and the focus on the Jewish victims stemmed from the alleged attacker’s anti-Jewish animus.
Then, following Reform UK’s gains in the May 7 local elections, Harriman shared a post that critics said compared the party’s success to the events that led to the Holocaust.
The post prompted Reform MP Robert Jenrick to respond on X, “Comparing the millions who voted Reform on Thursday to the Nazis is disgusting.”
Harriman received support from many prominent activists and artists who signed a petition in May organized by The Good Law Project. The petition accused right-wing media of running a smear campaign against Harriman.
Those who signed included activist Greta Thunberg, actors Aimee Lou Wood, Mark Ruffalo, and Susan Sarandon, director Yorgos Lanthimos and journalist Mehdi Hassan.
Following Harriman’s announcement, the Campaign Against Antisemitism praised the decision, posting on X, “Mr Harriman’s decision to step down – supposedly always his intention – is welcome. This saga has exposed a rot in the arts world. We hope that his successor will be more worthy of the post.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Mamdani touts ‘Babies not Bombs’ messaging after flexing political muscle in the New York primaries
(New York Jewish Week) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated the victories of the progressive candidates he endorsed in New York’s Democratic primaries describing their success as a “shift in the balance of power.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the morning after the primaries, Mamdani touted the triumphs as a shift in the balance of power between “working people” and “special interests.”
Mamdani-endorsed candidates Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez won Democratic nominations for Congress. During the press conference, the mayor repeatedly highlighted their calls to restrict U.S. military aid to Israel and redirect federal funding to domestic priorities.
Following Mamdani’s election night sweep in New York, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
The victories offered an early demonstration of Mamdani’s political influence beyond City Hall, as several Democratic Socialist candidates he backed, including Chevalier, defeated established Democratic incumbents in their districts.
“The working person is struggling in our city to afford basic needs,” Mamdani said, adding that Avila Chevalier’s oft-repeated slogan of investing in “Babies not Bombs,” is “the kind of conscience, the kind of clarity, the kind of conviction that has been missing in our politics for far too long.”
Mamdani responded to the president’s post on Wednesday, telling a reporter who asked whether his goal is to make America a “socialist” country that his “goal is to make America a place that every American can afford.”
When asked about federal policies that could be affected by Mamdani’s endorsed candidates, the mayor cited Valdez’s support for “foreign policy that understands human rights for all” and Lander’s commitment to co-sponsoring the Block the Bombs Act, which prohibits the sale of certain U.S.-made offensive weapons to Israel.
Mamdani also dismissed a question about whether he was concerned about how the victories would play out in November as Democrats try to win back the House.
“Every time the fight for working people takes a step forward, you will hear Republicans say that this is actually going to jeopardize the existence of that very fight,” he said.
When asked whether the election of Chevalier, who has faced scrutiny for past social media posts attacking Democrats and her appearance at an Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, could “complicate campaigns for Democrats as a whole,” Mamdani replied “No.”
“[Chevalier] often speaks about a politics of life. She speaks about ‘Babies not bombs,’” Mamdani continued. “What could be a better example of what the people of the district want to see versus what the people of the district have been forced to experience, which is tens of billions of dollars being spent at a national level to bomb children overseas, while children in our own districts are struggling.”
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