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A century before Mamdani, this Jewish socialist mayoral candidate divided NYC Jews
A socialist immigrant running for mayor on an anti-war, pro–working class platform divides New York’s Jews over whether his campaign, and potential victory, might stoke antisemitism.
The year isn’t 2025, and the man isn’t Zohran Mamdani. It’s 1917, and Jewish labor lawyer Morris Hillquit is running on the Socialist Party ticket.
While Hillquit fell well short of winning, he received more than 100,000 votes, or about 22% — over four times the Socialist tally four years earlier. He ran again in 1932, receiving about 12 percent of the vote.
Who was Hillquit, and how did his mayoral moment parallel the political currents shaping Mamdani’s rise today?
The economic parallels
Many aspects of Hillquit’s 1917 and 1932 mayoral platforms bear a striking resemblance to Mamdani’s today, according to Shelton Stromquist, emeritus professor of history at the University of Iowa and author of Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism.
Hillquit called for public ownership of the city’s transportation, and for the construction of affordable housing to replace substandard living arrangements. He also promised to bring down food prices, pledging to “put the milk profiteers out of business” by buying milk directly from farmers and selling it at cost.
Mamdani’s campaign has echoed many of those ideas, centering on affordability with proposals to make buses “fast and free,” freeze rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments, and create city-owned grocery stores.
And just as Mamdani has positioned his campaign as fighting big-money influence, Hillquit’s campaigns took on a populist tone.
“Too long have the people of New York been misruled for the benefit of bankers, franchise magnates, realty speculators, landlords, and other capitalists,” read a pamphlet distributed by the Socialist Party endorsing Morris Hillquit for mayor in 1932.
Both campaigns also drew on immigrant pride, according to Stromquist. Mamdani was born in Uganda; Hillquit in modern-day Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1869. Hillquit’s family immigrated to the U.S. in 1896, settling in a Lower East Side tenement. He dropped out of school to help support them, working in garment factories and later helping to start the United Hebrew Trades, a garment workers’ union.
Like Mamdani, “Hillquit’s campaign was singular in many ways, but at the same time, it was very much a part of a broader movement that had been growing and spreading,” Stromquist said.
Mamdani, for his part, cites Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — a fellow democratic socialist — as an inspiration. Sanders endorsed Mamdani and featured him on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, events that often draw tens of thousands of people and highlight other rising democratic socialists, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A recent poll shows socialism is more appealing to college students than capitalism.
Municipal socialism was also gaining traction in the early 20th century. In 1910, Jewish politician and journalist Victor Berger became the first socialist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a Milwaukee district. In 1913, socialists won a majority on Hamilton, Ohio’s city council and elected the mayor.
And while Hillquit lost the 1917 mayoral race, socialists still made gains in New York City that year: 10 state assemblymen, seven city aldermen, and one municipal judge were elected on the Socialist Party ticket. Of those 18 elected, 16 were Jewish.
A campaign that divided Jews
Mamdani’s positions on Israel have roiled Jews across the country, and he’s often had to defend himself against allegations of antisemitism for: refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada;” reiterating support for Palestinians in his statement on the Gaza ceasefire; vowing to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York; and saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. He’s simultaneously built a coalition of Jews who support him.
During the 1917 mayoral election, opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I overshadowed economic concerns for many voters, according to Stromquist.
Hillquit, a pacifist, was a principal co-author of the Socialist Party’s resolution opposing U.S. entry into World War I, and he made peace a central plank of his campaign.
His stance drew fierce backlash. Opponents labeled him “a traitor and an agent of the Kaiser,” and the attacks quickly grew personal. A 1917 editorial in this publication, the Yiddish Forverts, noted that Hillquit’s “bitterest enemies wish to see him drown in the Rutger Street fountain, or hanged off a sloop on the East Side.”
Hillquit’s position split the Jewish community. Some feared antiwar sentiment would make Jews appear unpatriotic and fuel antisemitism, according to Gil Ribak, associate professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona and author of the paper “For Peace, Not Socialism”: The 1917 Mayoralty Campaign in New York City and Immigrant Jews in a Global Perspective.”
One newspaper editor wrote to his readers as “a Jew to Jews,” asking them if they wanted “to give a chance for our neighbors to say that we are not loyal enough to America?”
Even Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis weighed in, telling his colleagues at a private meeting of Zionist leadership in 1917, “I cannot help feeling myself that the pacifistic attitude of some Jews is a danger to all Jews, and some form of a pogrom would not be at all unlikely.”
Others dismissed such concerns as fearmongering and rejected the idea that Jews had to vote a certain way to prevent antisemitism. As Forward founding editor Abraham Cahan argued in this publication, “Well, if we are destined, heaven forbid, to have the antisemitic bear come at us, then let’s not give our vote to a corrupt gang.”
Ultimately, the attacks on Hillquit did not deter Jewish voters. Though he fell well short of winning office, according to Ribak, turnout for Hillquit was especially strong in Jewish neighborhoods with the socialist candidate winning more than 60 percent of the Jewish vote in some areas of the Lower East Side.
Chana Pollack contributed research. Jacob Kornbluh contributed writing.
The post A century before Mamdani, this Jewish socialist mayoral candidate divided NYC Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
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Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Holocaust Survivors Sent Care Packages to Oct. 7 Hostages for Hanukkah
The Menorah for Hanukkah on the Square 2025 in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Matthew Chattle/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Survivors of the Holocaust spread holiday cheer this Hanukkah by delivering care packages to a group of 20 hostages whom the terrorist group Hamas recently released from captivity to fulfill the requirements of a ceasefire which suspended hostilities with Israel.
The gifts, dropped off at the Israeli consulate office in New York City, was made possible by The Blue Card, the only US-based charity organization which provides financial assistance and other services to survivors of the Holocaust. Originally founded in 1934 to assist Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler’s persecution of the country’s Jews, it has operated ceaselessly for nearly a century.
Over the past two years, the world has seen a revival of antisemitism unlike any since the period in which The Blue Card was founded, sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that claimed the lives over of 1,200 Israelis and stole years and even more lives from 251 more who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.
Some of the hostages who survived captivity have been released in stages since Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire in October, and on Monday, Blue Card executive director Masha Pearl said the organization felt it necessary to reach out to them due to their having experienced a plight that is painfully familiar to what its clients endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Pearl also discussed the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in which a father and son inspired by Islamism opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah, murdering 15 people and injuring 40 others.
“Holocaust survivors and former hostages share a uniquely painful bond shaped by survival and resilience,” Pearl said. “After witnessing a mass shooting at a Chanukah event in Sydney, it felt even more urgent for our survivors to deliver these care packages now, spreading light at a moment that feels dark for the entire Jewish world. The resilience of the Holocaust survivors we assist, the former hostages, and now the survivors of the attack in Australia remind us that even in the face of hatred and violence, the Jewish people remain united.”
In a press release Blue Card said the care packages “carried profound meaning,” being filled to the brim with goods of all sorts, from blankets and water bottles to chap stick and even handwritten notes from the Holocaust survivors who sent them.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.