(JTA) — The excitement in the air is palpable as our neighborhood turns out for Zohran Mamdani. In many ways, we know him well: he’s been our assemblyman for the last four years. In any other world, we would be excited by the possibility of a man like Zohran — an eloquent speaker, attuned to the affordability crisis, relatable despite his family wealth, a first-name figure in the community — rising up to challenge the establishment.

But that is not our portion. As Jews of District 36, Zohran’s Assembly district, we live in a world where his tenure and campaign have fragmented our community, fractured our trust in each other, and upended our sense of belonging and safety. We are left-wing Jews, right-wing Jews, and out-of-the-box Jews who want nothing more than to focus on the kinds of policy questions that affect our material conditions as New Yorkers.

But our experience in our neighborhood has torn us away from everyday concerns like making the rent and paying for groceries. That’s because the vision that Zohran said drew him to the Democratic Socialists of America five years ago — a stance on Palestine that calls for the isolation of Zionists, rejects “normalization” or relationships between anti-Zionists and supporters of Israel, and sanctions armed violence — has shaped what it’s like to live here since Oct. 7, 2023.

We go to different synagogues, work in different fields, and have different Jewish backgrounds. But when we came together as friends and neighbors in a local WhatsApp group for Astoria Jews in the aftermath of Oct. 7, we learned we had a common experience — one that we unfortunately shared with others in our neighborhood’s diverse Jewish community. Here, with the collective input of local Jews — religious and irreligious, queer and traditional, Mizrahi, Sephardi and Ashkenazi — we explain why our objections to a Mayor Mamdani are rooted not in abstract fear or deep-seated bias, but the product of daily life in a community shaped by Zohran’s public political choices.

On Oct. 8, 2023, just hours after the Hamas attack in Israel, Mamdani opted for a political statement of blame, rather than words of comfort and care so desperately needed by his own constituents. Since then, we’ve seen graffiti reading “Long Live Hamas,” “Sinwar Lives,” “Kill Yourself Zionist,” and Hamas red triangles spray-painted on residential buildings and businesses. Flyers attacking “Zionist capital” were distributed during a local rezoning debate, and people waving Hamas flags have rallied in our streets.

At a holiday block party, a mother was called a “genocidal killer” in front of her preschool-aged children; another was called a “bitch” by a man miming throat-slitting while she scraped graffiti from a lamp post. At a neighborhood bar’s karaoke night, a man sang “Deutschland über alles” while giving a Nazi salute. Posters and stickers with keffiyehs and machine guns have regularly appeared near playgrounds and public spaces.

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Our teens have skipped school on cultural appreciation days to avoid being ostracized, and our hearts have shattered as our children reassure us of their safety with phrases like “don’t worry, no one knows I’m Jewish.” Signs that welcome the stranger, the immigrant — a longstanding Jewish value immortalized in verse by the Jewish-American poet Emma Lazarus — now live alongside swastikas and hate-speech on lampposts and shop windows across the district.

What we haven’t seen is any meaningful response to just how normal this has become. When a local business hung a massive, blinking “Fuck Israel” sign alongside a portrait of Hitler, we spoke up at our community board meeting in front of a silent Mamdani representative, to no response. We have filed complaints, we’ve removed stickers, we’ve spray-painted over violent imagery — and we’ve been at it alone. This is not the New York we want to live in, and this is not the New York of equality, safety and inclusivity that Zohran is promising.

In a city as diverse as New York, where nearly 40% of residents are immigrants and many more are part of transnational or multicultural communities, Jewish New Yorkers are not unique in carrying layered identities. The 80% of American Jews that consider Israel to be an “essential or important component” of their identity, are mirrored by Indian, Korean and Dominican Americans who feel the same connection to their homeland. What is unique, and unacceptable, is being sent the message that this connection is somehow at odds with our identity as New Yorkers.

This election is not a referendum on Israel or the place of Jews in New York City. It is, more pointedly, a reflection of a referendum that has already taken place; one that shaped the culture in which Zohran was raised as a cosmopolitan scion of the academic and cultural elite, with access to some of the best resources this city has to offer.

These resources — private grammar schools, specialized high schools, wealthy neighborhoods, the glitter- and literati — hold hints of old-boys-club antisemitism filtered through the lens of new-age anti-Zionism. Left unquestioned, they lay the foundation for an unrecognizable New York. When 54% of all hate crimes last year targeted Jews, we would argue we are already halfway there.

When we heard Zohran describe the fear of his Muslim family members in the aftermath of 9/11, we wondered why he can’t see the fear of most Jewish New Yorkers today.

We took notice when he said, as he was reported as saying in Brooklyn, that he would be here for us “when the mezuzah falls.” We want to be clear: a mezuzah doesn’t fall. A mezuzah is taken down discreetly while the streets echo with calls to globalize the intifada. It is kissed one last time, while the memory of being called a genocide lover in front of your children infuses the parchment. It is wrapped and placed in a box alongside other whispering mementos from grandparents who survived Iraq, Morocco, Poland, France, Uzbekistan, as we wonder if its hum has gotten loud enough for us to listen and know that the time to leave has come once more.

Our pain and fears are real and valid; the frustrations on all sides of the Jewish spectrum come from a shared concern for the wellbeing of our city and all of humanity. In our synagogues, alongside the prayer for Israel, we say the prayer for our country and wish wisdom upon its leaders, just as Jews have wished upon the leaders of every Diaspora nation where we have lived.

Our history has taken us, the Jewish people, through many lands, from our origins as a people called Israel in the Levant through thousands of years of exile, transfer and return. Today, just over a million of us — still that same people — are proud to call New York City home, and we want to keep calling this city home. We have given deeply to this place, pouring in whatever we had in every generation: labor, culture, protest, philanthropy, policy, innovation. So, too, have we been nourished by this city.

We love New York. We want to stay, not in silence, not on sufferance, but fully and without fear. We wonder if that is possible in a city led by Zohran Mamdani.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

The post We’re Jews in Zohran Mamdani’s neighborhood. You don’t want NYC to be like this. appeared first on The Forward.

On Kol Nidrei, the evening service that begins Yom Kippur, I found myself at synagogue with Zohran Mamdani.

Lab/Shul in Manhattan isn’t your typical synagogue; it’s a laboratory for belonging, where ancient liturgy meets radical inclusion. The service was led by my rabbi, Amichai Lau-Lavie — an Israeli who knows how to fill the room with both grief and hope.

Mamdani sat in the front row, with Rep. Jerry Nadler and Comptroller Brad Lander. As Lau-Lavie welcomed them to the space, Nadler and Lander were greeted with respectful applause. But when Mamdani’s name was spoken something electric ripped through the room. The applause didn’t just rise, it roared. It was long, sustained, defiant, joyful.

For me, that welcome of Mamdani — a Muslim and openly leftist candidate — on the holiest night of the Jewish year wasn’t symbolic. It was spiritual. It was the sound of a community saying: we are not afraid. And I wasn’t either. I felt safe. Seen. At home.

“My commitment is to make every New Yorker feel safe — Jews included — through policy grounded in equality, not fear,” Mamdani said earlier this year, as reported in The Guardian. That night, in the sanctuary, those words felt real.

A few days later came another night I’ll never forget — the Israelis for Peace vigil marking two years since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

Hundreds gathered — Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Arabs, Americans — huddled together on folding chairs in Union Square in chilly weather, under an open sky. As part of a wide-ranging lineup, from the stage, I read a message from Liat Atzili, whose husband Aviv was killed that day; a short, piercing story by Etgar Keret; and a poem by Mahmoud Darwish that hung in the air like a spell.

And there was Mamdani again, sitting quietly in the front row next to Lander. He didn’t take the microphone. He didn’t try to center the event on himself. He was just listening. Bearing witness.

His presence wasn’t performative. It was pastoral. In a city that so often divides its grief by identity, he crossed the invisible line and simply showed up.

That’s when it hit me: This is what safety looks like. Not fences or slogans, not solidarity-as-branding — but the radical act of standing with people in pain, without needing to own or edit it.

A recent poll showed that 43% of Jewish New Yorkers plan to support Mamdani — and among those under 44, that number climbs to 675. That data tells me what I felt that night wasn’t isolated. It’s a generational shift: younger Jews — and Israelis like me — no longer see solidarity with Palestinians as a threat, but as a responsibility.

Because despite what the right-wing Israeli government and media want us to believe, we — Jews, Israelis, people who still believe in equality — are not in danger from Zohran Mamdani because he is critical of Israel. We’re endangered, instead by the machinery of fear that tries to convince us that justice is a threat, that empathy is betrayal, that solidarity is naïve.

So let’s ask honestly: What is so terrifying about Zohran Mamdani?

That he condemns Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people?

That he grieved — publicly and unapologetically — over the catastrophe in Gaza?

That he refuses to conflate the safety of American Jews with unquestioned support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

For me, as an Israeli-American who is committed enough to Israel to fight endlessly for it to be just and equal, that’s not frightening — it’s hopeful. Having mayors and public leaders who refuse to give Kahanists or corrupt war criminals a free pass is good for us. That’s our struggle too.

As Mamdani said in a recent mayoral debate: “I would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion.”

That statement isn’t anti-Israel — it’s pro-democracy. It comes from the same moral compass that drives him to oppose Islamophobia and antisemitism alike.

Mamdani isn’t anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish. He’s pro-justice. He’s a New Yorker who believes, as I do, that no one’s safety should come at the expense of someone else’s. His campaign has pledged a large increase in anti-hate crime programming — the opposite of neglecting our safety.

The truth is, Israel’s official alliances — with would-be authoritarians like President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — have left many of us politically homeless and deeply afraid. We know that corrupt, authoritarian leaders always come for the Jews eventually and that cozying up to them has never made us safe. And in New York, the other homeland for so many Jews — including many Israelis — we have a chance to rebuild belonging on different terms: ones grounded in equality, accountability and imagination.

Amid the thunderous sanctity of Kol Nidrei and the Oct. 7 vigil’s quiet solidarity, I’ve seen the same thing: people choosing to show up for each other, even in the hardest of times.

That seems to be the city Zohran Mamdani wants to build, and it’s a city I want to live in. I think a lot of Israelis — here and back home — want that and might indeed benefit from it too.

The post I’m an Israeli who lives in New York. Here’s why I’m voting for Mamdani appeared first on The Forward.

Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy for mayor of New York City has become a matter of national debate — particularly among Jews. Recently, more than 1,000 rabbis across the country signed a letter singling out Mamdani as a threat to Jewish safety under the heading, “Defending the Jewish future.”

If you didn’t know better, you might think that Mamdani had used Nazi rhetoric or used racist or antisemitic language. He hasn’t. He’s only “guilty” of criticizing Israel: The rabbis’ letter references no antisemitic language because, by all appearances, Mamdani has not trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric.

This week marked the seventh anniversary of the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the single bloodiest day for Jews in the history of the United States. The killer justified the slaughter by invoking a conspiracy theory that Jewish groups like HIAS were bringing immigrant “invaders in that kill our people.” The following year, a gunman who killed one synagogue-goer in the town of Poway, California — where a number of my congregants live — penned a similar screed, claiming that “every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race… and every Jew plays his part to enslave the other races around him.”

The contrast between the anniversary of the tragedy of the Tree of Life and the furor about Mamdani has deeply troubled me. Because while many members of our national Jewish community have come to perceive the potential election of a mayor who is critical of Israel as one of the greatest threats to our future in this country, the hate speech that fueled those two killers continues to be not just normalized on the right, but turned into a central element of its political platform.

It is this reality that makes the rabbinic letter about Mamdani heartbreaking. At a moment of increasing threats to the safety of all marginalized communities in this country, my colleagues have targeted the wrong person and the wrong movement.

In a democratic society, the candidacy of a young mayoral candidate who challenges the righteousness of Israeli actions is not a threat to the “Jewish future.” It is an invitation to engage in discussion about those actions.

By contrast, the rise of the “great replacement” theory and its ilk — baseless claims of “white replacement” or “white genocide” — is a threat to the future of all minorities, including Jews. This awful movement, which has led to violence against Jews, immigrants of color, Muslims, and trans people, has found a home in mainstream Republican politics. The Department of Homeland Security increasingly utilizes white supremacist language in recruiting new employees and arresting immigrants including phrases like “report all foreign invaders” and “defend your culture!”

Frighteningly similar language has been used by those who have Jewish blood on their hands.

Ironically, the right’s willingness to indulge in open Jew-hatred has shown up even in arguments about Israel. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently criticized lobbying efforts by AIPAC, invoking classic antisemitism: “I’ll never take 30 shekels,” she wrote on X earlier this month, “I’m America only! And Christ is King!”

At least as troubling is the revelation that Republican operatives regularly engage in racist, sexist and antisemitic discourse, as was recently reported by Politico. These messages illustrate all too clearly the MAGA movement’s descent into bigotry. They include praise of Hitler, white supremacist shorthand, jokes about gas chambers, and one claim that it’s a mistake to “expect… the Jew to be honest.” Together, these messages offer a chilling glimpse into the mindset currently ruling the Republican Party.

Vice-President JD Vance dismissed “pearl clutching” over those texts — a choice in keeping with others made by President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to the position of White House Special Counsel; Ingrassia was recently revealed to have said he had a “Nazi streak.”(He also said that all of Africa is a “shithole.”) Ingrassia withdrew his name from consideration for that position, but his “punishment” has been to instead remain in his job as White House Liaison to the Department of Justice. Department of Defense spokesperson Kingsley Wilson has posted antisemitic conspiracy theories, featuring references to the “great replacement” theory and the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915. She remains in her job as well, as does the most prominent law enforcement official in the nation, FBI Director Kash Patel, who regularly appeared on the podcast of notorious Jew-hater Stew Peters.

Where is the rabbinic outrage about this spate of antisemitism in the highest levels of power in this country?

That rabbis composed and distributed a letter condemning a single candidate for mayor in one city, while too often remaining silent regarding the explicit hate speech that now runs through the Republican party, is embarrassing and shameful. The Trump administration recently scrubbed a report from the Department of Justice website showing that right-wing extremism is far and away the most prevalent threat to marginalized communities in this country. For more than 1,000 rabbis to treat this reality as less serious a threat than Mamdani, in itself, a threat to Jewish safety.

Perhaps our rabbinic colleagues feel it is too dangerous to confront the party in power in this country. Perhaps they are afraid of losing access, or funding, or alienating donors. But Jewish history is replete with examples showing that appeasement of Jew-haters never makes Jews safe.

What has helped cultivate Jewish safety has been the work of solidarity. Building genuine investment in relationships across lines of difference — the kind of relationship-building that Mamdani himself has modeled with Jewish New Yorkers — is the best kind of investment in a secure Jewish future. For the sake of the safety of Jews from Poway to Park Avenue, I pray that my colleagues might begin to understand this.

The post Why are we so focused on Mamdani — not Nazi-inspired ideas proliferating on the right? appeared first on The Forward.