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How Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani’s politics shaped New York City’s new mayor
(New York Jewish Week) — When he sat down for an interview in November with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mahmood Mamdani offered one parameter: “Let’s not talk about the mayor thing.”
It was just two days after the Columbia University professor had taken the stage alongside his wife and daughter-in-law after his son Zohran had been elected mayor of New York City, winning more than 50% of the vote in a three-way race.
Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist with a long track record of pro-Palestinian activism, has said he counts his father as one of his political inspirations.
But Mahmood Mamdani preferred to talk about his own record, as a professor of anthropology and international affairs and a longstanding pro-Palestinian activist who was the first faculty member to address the Gaza war encampment on his campus.
His wife, filmmaker Mira Nair, and Zohran’s wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, likewise are respected in their fields and well known for their pro-Palestinian advocacy and adherence to the movement to boycott Israel.
Zohran Mamdani has described the BDS movement as “consistent with the core of my politics,” and in 2023 introduced a bill while serving as an assemblymember that sought to block nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
While it is unclear the extent to which Mamdani will pursue BDS policies during his upcoming mayoral term, his politics and those of his parents reflect a shared alignment with pro-Palestinian causes.
“When you’re the kid of two parents who are very involved in social justice, a lot of times what you remember as a playdate was you being at some rally or some march,” Mamdani recalled in an interview with City & State in April 2023.
Now, as Zohran takes the city’s reins, here’s what you need to know about his immediate family.
Mahmood Mamdani, viewing Israel through an anti-colonial lens
Long before his son’s mayoral campaign, Mahmood Mamdani, 79, was known widely as one of the foremost scholars on colonialism and postcolonial politics in Africa. Born in India in 1946, Mamdani was raised in Kampala, Uganda at a time when the country was racially segregated. After receiving his bachelors, masters and doctorate from universities in the United States, Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972 after Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered all Asians to leave the country.
Since 1999, he has been a professor of government at Columbia University, and has published several books and essays on colonialism and political violence including “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism” in 1996 and “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror” in 2004.
As a scholar, Mahmood Mamdani is best known for his analysis of colonial rule and how it shapes the identities of both the occupied and occupiers. In his 2020 book, “Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities,” he uses case studies that include Nazi Germany, Israelis and Palestinians and post-apartheid South Africa.
Mamdani has spoken directly and repeatedly about how his broader scholarship shapes his thinking on Israel and Palestinians. “The issue is not settlers, but settler colonialism,” he wrote in “Neither Settler nor Native.” In 2021, during an 11-day outbreak of violence between Hamas and Israel that was sparked by tensions in Jerusalem, Mamdani wrote on X, “Palestinians have a right to resist. This is a colonial occupation, not a conflict!”
Three days later, as Hamas and Israel exchanged missiles and airstrikes, Mamdani wrote that the conflict was not between Israel and Hamas, but rather the resurgence of a third intifada.
“The resistance this time began in Jerusalem and spread to Gaza, now the West Bank and Palestinian communities beyond. This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas,” wrote Mamdani in a post on X. “We are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the Third Intifadah against settler colonialism!”
In 2002, as the second intifada was in full force, Mamdani signed onto a petition calling for Columbia University to divest from companies supplying arms to Israel, saying at the time his support for the petition was to make a “moral statement registering concern over the exercise of power by Israel.”
In the Chronicle of Higher Education interview, Mahmood Mamdani spoke about being the first faculty member to address the pro-Palestinian protesters who set up an encampment at Columbia in 2024. He said his talk focused on “lessons of the divestment movement in South Africa.”
In a 2022 Zoom lecture at the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the University of Virginia, Mahmood Mamdani argued that while there was reason to give “full and enthusiastic support” to the BDS movement, he cautioned against the movement extending its boycotts against the breadth of “Israeli society and not just to its Zionist sectors.”
During his lecture, Mamdani also argued that Israel must learn from the dissolution of the South African apartheid, saying that the only way forward in the region was if there was an “epistemic revolution” in Israel where they realized the “flourishing of Jews and Jewish life does not require a Zionist state.”
“Whites did not need to monopolize political power to have a home in South Africa. It is this lesson that needs to be driven home to Israelis, as many as possible, that Jews do not need to have a Jewish state to have a secure home in Israel-Palestine,” said Mamdani. “Indeed, Jews are more secure in New York City than they are in Israel.”
Asked whether he supports a one-state solution, Mamdani recently told The Chronicle, “I’m sympathetic to only one type of one state, a state which is based on rule of law and guarantees equal rights,” a position his son echoed on the campaign trail. “I’m opposed to any kind of discrimination. I’m opposed to any form of apartheid which I understand to be a legally enforced distinction between two groups in society, where one benefits and the other is penalized.”
In an interview with The Nation in January 2024, Mamdani criticized the public response to the pro-Palestinian protests erupting across the U.S., saying that conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a danger to democracy.
“To conflate the critique of a state with the critique of a people poses a challenge to a democratic culture,” he said. In his recent Chronicle interview, Mamdani pointed favorably to the Jerusalem Declaration definition of antisemitism, signed by over 200 mostly Jewish scholars, which insists that the movement to boycott Israel is not in and of itself antisemitic. The declaration, he said, “makes a very clear distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel,” as opposed to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition.
In a January 2024 letter published in the Columbia Spectator, Mahmood Mamdani criticized the school for dissuading the use of the words “intifada” and “from the river to the sea,” arguing that excluding them would “rule out any meaningful dialogue on Israel and Palestine on this campus.” (He told the Chronicle that the “river to the seas” concept appears in the Likud party manifesto, which declares that “between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” He also claimed that he had not actually heard “from the river to the sea” chanted in Columbia’s quad, and had only read about it.)
Zohran Mamdani similarly downplayed rhetoric that many Israel supporters consider incendiary. In June he declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the Intifada,” arguing that the phrase symbolized a “desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” (Mamdani later said he would “discourage” the use of the phrase, which many supporters of Israel, recalling two violent uprisings of Palestinians in 1987 and 2000 that killed hundreds of Israelis, see as a call to violence.)
At an appearance on the encampments, Mamdani described charges of antisemitism as “part of the currency the administration uses to demonize protests like this,” according to the Columbia Spectator.
Critics of the elder Mamdani say he underplays Jewish historical vulnerability and antisemitism, minimizes Palestinian political agency and their internal divisions, and ignores the way Zionism differs from European colonialism. But like his son, he believes even younger Jews are increasingly adopting his critique of Israel and Zionism.
In a December interview with Peter Beinart for Jewish Currents, a leftist magazine, he said he believed the Jewish diasporic community would play an “important role” in discussions over the “Palestinian question” in the future.
“Jewish children in New York City have become increasingly skeptical of the direction in which Israel has been moving, and increasingly disillusioned with both the moral and the political efficacy of that route and increasingly open to explore an alternative,” said Mamdani.
Mira Nair, a supporter of cultural boycotts
Nair is an award-winning Indian-American filmmaker whose debut 1988 film, “Salaam Bombay!,” earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. She also directed several acclaimed films including “Mississippi Masala” in 1991, “Monsoon Wedding” in 2001 and “The Namesake” in 2006.
Born in India, she met Mahmood Mamdani in Uganda in 1989, and they married two years later. Nair was also married to the Jewish photographer Mitch Epstein from 1981 to sometime before 1989; he has declined JTA’s requests for an interview.
Nair has also been an outspoken critic of Israel and a supporter of petitions backing the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.
In 2013, Nair declined an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival. “I will not be going to Israel at this time. I will go to Israel when the walls come down. I will go to Israel when occupation is gone,” she tweeted at the time. In a subsequent post, she added that she stood with the BDS movement.
In March of this year, Nair signed onto a petition calling for the Academy Awards to remove Israeli actress Gal Gadot from its ceremony, accusing her of showing “support for Israel’s military actions against Palestinians,” according to an Instagram post by the group.
Following the election of her son, Nair has also declined to discuss Mamdani’s attitudes towards Jews and Israel in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“What I love so much about Zohran is that he embraces the multiplicity of our lives in the most natural way — this mosaic that is our city but that no one has seen until this young man came along,” Nair told The Hollywood Reporter of her son.
Rama Duwaji, an artist with a political vision
Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, whom he married this year, has also made pro-Palestinian advocacy a focal point of her work in ceramics, animation and illustrations.
While Duwaji has largely refused interviews with the press and did not appear at campaign events or fundraisers, last month she sat for her first interview post election with The Cut.
“Speaking out about Palestine, Syria, Sudan — all these things are really important to me,” Duwaji told The Cut. “I’m always keeping up to date with what’s going on, not just here but elsewhere. It feels fake to talk about anything else when that’s all that’s on my mind, all I want to put down on paper.”
“Everything is political; it’s the thing that I talk about with [Zohran] and my friends, the thing that I’m up to date with every morning, which is probably not great for my mental health. It’s what I talk about when I check on my family back home,” continued Duwaji.
During the interview Duwaji also discussed the meaning behind part of her election night outfit —- a black top designed by Zeid Hijazi, a London-based Palestinian-Jordanian label.
“It’s nice to have a little bit of analysis on the clothes because, for instance, during the general-election night, it was nice to send a message about Palestinians by wearing a Palestinian designer,” said Duwaji.
Duwaji, 28, who is ethnically Syrian and grew up in Texas and Dubai, also frequently posts illustrations that advocate for pro-Palestinian causes on her Instagram account. Her art has been featured in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the BBC, and VICE, according to her website.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNQ85ehpSo6/?hl=en
In August, she posted an animation of the Palestinian flag along with the words “end the genocide,” and posted another last month depicting the Global Sumud Flotilla.
In March, she posted an illustration of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, calling for his release after he was detained by the Trump administration amid its campaign to purportedly combat campus antisemitism.
“This is an attack on freedom of speech, and sets a scary f—king precedent for anyone who speaks up for what’s right. Resist,” wrote Duwaji.
“He’s his own person”
In an interview with the New York Times in June, Mahmood Mamdani spurned suggestions that his politics had an outsized impact on his son’s political views.
“He’s his own person,” Mamdani said. “Now, of course what we do as his parents is part of the environment in which he grew up, and he couldn’t help but engage with it. That doesn’t mean anything is reflected back on us.”
But Nair was quick to disagree, telling the Times that her son had “very much absorbed” his parents’ politics, which largely center on anti-colonialism.
“I don’t agree!” Ms. Nair said. “Of course the world we live in, and what we write and film and think about, is the world that Zohran has very much absorbed.”
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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Trump’s assault on democracy, echoes of Nazi Germany but new glimmers of hope that America will be different
In the final, tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, a succession of arch-conservative chancellors ruled by emergency decree rather than go through the Reichstag, the German parliament. Germany had become a democracy in name only, as reactionary power brokers steered the nation deeper into totalitarian waters, ultimately opening the door for Hitler.
As we approach our mid-term elections, America too is at a pivot point — with the burning question being whether Donald Trump’s grip on MAGA lawmakers can be broken so that Congress, feckless like the Reichstag of the late Weimar Republic, can resume its constitutional role as a check on the executive.
It’s a matter of life or death for American democracy as it nears its 250th birthday.
As Trump’s poll numbers tank while GOP lawmakers’ support for him endures, I find myself musing about the Weimar Republic and the self-immolation of its national legislature.
In the final months before they came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler and the Nazis were actually on the ropes. After they had become the largest party in the Reichstag in July elections a year earlier, two million Germans abandoned the Nazis in an election that November. Many Germans were less enamored of the Nazi leader, fatigued by a sense that the Nazis thrived on disorder. The spell seemed to be breaking. Does this ring a bell? Economics also played a role: Germany was finally emerging from the Great Depression.
But the German republic had already been brought to a breaking point by street fighting, political chaos, the Great Depression, and a coterie of arch-conservative power brokers who schemed and maneuvered to scrap Germany’s first democracy. They included Chancellor Franz von Papen.
Papen was unable to form a majority coalition after the July 1932 election because of huge gains by the Nazis and losses by other key parties, so he continued to govern by emergency decree with the consent of President Paul von Hindenburg, relying on the broad emergency powers of Article 48 of the constitution that had already hollowed out parliamentary rule.
More internal scheming resulted in Papen’s ouster after the November 1932 election. He was replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher, a master of intrigue. But Schleicher lasted only two months, as disagreements raged over whether to give Hitler a role in the government, and what that role should be. The reactionary schemers eventually reached a consensus: Let Hitler have the chancellorship but keep him in check by loading the cabinet with archconservatives like Papen. Once Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, it didn’t take him long to outmaneuver all of the other schemers, who became puppets of the Nazi leader instead of the puppet masters.
Germany’s political establishment — all but the Social Democrats and the banned Communists — ceremoniously handed the keys over to Hitler on March 23, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, dismantling parliamentary democracy and giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
Which brings us to the question: Whither American democracy?
Under Trump, our Congress has been reduced to a shell of its former self, an American analog of the toothless Reichstag. As Trump has launched assault after assault on the pillars of American democracy — on the judiciary, on higher education, on free speech, our election system, the rule of law, and even on unflattering but true chapters in American history — Republicans have kept quiet, fearing Trump’s wrath and retribution.
But now there are glimmers of hope. Trump’s broken promises, self-aggrandizement, megalomania, corruption, utter indifference to everyday Americans’ economic suffering, and relentless catering to the country’s wealthiest are finally catching up with him. New polls put his approval rating at a dismal 37%. In a New York Times/Siena poll, just 28% of voters approved of how Trump is handling the cost of living, while only 31% approved of his war with Iran. Even Fox News had him at 39% approval. That same poll showed GOP support for Trump weakening considerably on his handling of the economy.
Economic pain is driving the collapse. The soaring costs of the war in Iran, Trump’s vanity projects, and his proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, coupled with his push for lifetime immunity for himself and his family to commit tax fraud, have incensed voters who are already struggling to afford groceries, gas, housing and health care.
As Americans make impossible choices, the 47th president touts the glitzy White House ballroom he wants to build and his plans for an arch that would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe, all while prosecuting a war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and driven up prices worldwide. The widening gap between Trump’s self-indulgence and the country’s hardship is finally producing something late Weimar never managed: a meaningful break in the habit of submission to an aspiring strongman.
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This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7.
Sid Klein has finally found his subject. More than half a century after he scrambled to pick a topic for his senior art project at Brooklyn College—and settled on exploring the porcelain curves of a toilet bowl in a 20-painting series—he’s discovered a purpose.
Klein, 78, took a five-decade hiatus from art between college graduation and retirement. He picked his brushes back up just a few months before the events of Oct. 7.
Upon hearing of the Hamas attacks, Klein processed the news with acrylics. Soon, he began looking back to the Holocaust. He felt compelled to render contemporary and historical victims of hatred on paper and ultimately take on the mantle of combatting antisemitism, not with words or weapons but with images.
“For the first time in my life, I’m so motivated in my art,” Klein told me over Zoom from his home in South Florida. “All of a sudden I went from, ‘I don’t know what I want to paint,’ to, ‘I’ve got to make a record of this so people can look at these paintings and see what does antisemitism naturally lead to.’”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Klein noticed at a young age that he could depict objects in three dimensions. “I started drawing with Crayola crayons with paper that my mom would pick up [at] the local five and dime,” he said.
But his mother died when he was seven, leaving his father to raise three children on his own. Though they weren’t particularly religious, Klein said, he attended yeshiva. The extra-long school day helped his working single father make sure he was safe. Klein continued dabbling in art through elementary and high school.
The Holocaust was not part of his education, as far as he remembers, not at the yeshiva and not later in college, where he flitted from pre-law to economics to philosophy before settling on fine art. “I’d never been exposed to it,” he said. “I’d never seen the photographs. I consciously avoided the photographs.”
“I was living in this bubble so I could pretend that antisemitism did not exist,” he said.
He remained in that bubble through business school and a long career in marketing. During that time, “painting didn’t even cross my mind,” Klein said. “For 55 years, I focused on the business and totally ignored the art.”
It wasn’t until his career drew to a close that he thought he might try again. “I wanted to give it a try and see what was left,” he said. But he wanted to keep painting only if he had a worthy subject, which he found in the wake of the Hamas attacks.
“That murder affected me in a profound way,” said Klein, who has two sons and five grandchildren living in Israel. “I started painting in my mind what these 1,200 people would have looked like. And that was my return to art.”
The segue from the horrors of Oct. 7 to those of the Holocaust felt natural to Klein. “For me, all of those are one of the same. They’re all Jew hatred at different times in history,” he said. “The amount of evil in our world is just—I don’t know how to measure it.” There are endless tragedies, he said, “but I’m focusing on our people.”
Klein paints in a corner of the family room he’s designated as his studio. He regularly pores over hundreds of black-and-white photos taken in ghettos and camps, looking for his next subjects to call out to him.
In one photograph, he recalled, he saw lines upon lines of women and children, standing near cattle cars, waiting, exhausted. He distilled the scene to one row of imminent victims in “Innocents.” They’re “going to be taken to a gas chamber and they’re going to be dead in 20 minutes or a half hour, and they don’t know that,” he said. On the right, a boy tugs at his mother’s coat. The woman on the far left balances the small child in her arms alongside her pregnant belly. In the middle, another grasps a toddler’s hand. Their eyes implore the viewer to grapple with their fate.
Several of Klein’s Holocaust works were displayed earlier this year at the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica in Poland, on the grounds of the concentration camp system of the same name, where an estimated 120,000 people were imprisoned and 40,000 died.
“As employees of a Memorial Site, we have constant access to disturbing historical photos and documents; these are undeniably important, but viewing the victims through the eyes of an artist is an entirely different, more intimate experience,” Bartosz Surman, who works for the museum’s education department, told me. Surman estimated that approximately 4,000 people saw Klein’s work there between January 27 and March 31. “For a Memorial Site located in a village of fewer than a thousand people, we consider it a significant success and a testament to the power of Mr. Klein’s work,” he said.
Four thousand miles away, “My Zaidy” hangs on the wall at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in downtown Manhattan as part of the exhibition “Proverbs, Adages, and Maxims.”
The man in the painting wears a star under his heart. The bright yellow patch and pearlescent and gold shimmer of his face contrast with the matte blue of his coat and hat. But turning the corner of the exhibition, it’s the eyes that catch you. “I left them blank, so you can put in his eyes, any eyes you want,” Klein said—his zaidy’s or yours or a stranger’s.
The eyes may be missing but the gaze is powerful, as though this old man, as he approaches his cruel end, is staring and saying, “Look at me. Do you see what’s happening? Why are you just standing there?”
“A lot of bubbes and zaides were exterminated,” Klein said, including his paternal grandfather. But the zaidy in the painting isn’t Klein’s, exactly, he said. He can’t recall ever seeing a photo of him. Instead, he painted another elderly man in a photo that struck him: This is what a zaidy selected for the gas chamber looks like. This is what Klein’s zaidy could have looked like.
“I decided I was going to do a painting, and fill that hole in my heart,” Klein said.
“There’s something very haunting about the hollowed, empty eyes,” museum director Jeanie Rosensaft told me over the phone. “We were very touched, because although [Klein] has not had a long resume of art production, we felt that the image that he provided was very compelling.”.
Klein is one of 58 artists in the exhibition, and his work will be included in a tour the museum is organizing following its New York run, which ends June 24. “We hope that he continues on this path,” Rosensaft said. “It’s really essential that art bear witness to the past and provide a bridge to the future.”
Seeing the pain
Klein’s next painting, he told me, was inspired by a photo of two small children, empty bowls in hand, begging for food.
“If I had more working space, I would make my paintings bigger,” said Klein, who says he hopes to one day create life-size portraits. “Right now you’ve got to get pretty close to see what the hell is going on,” he said. “I want size to be part of your experience seeing the pain.”
Spending his days sifting through Holocaust photos and painting its victims takes a toll. “When I paint, I become emotionally involved. But when it’s done, I listen to my music for a couple of hours, and that gives me the emotional strength to continue,” says Klein, who puts on Vivaldi, Mozart, or Brahms, for example. “After I do a painting, I need this music to settle my nerves.”
“Sometimes I say, ‘Klein, try something else!’” he said. But he can’t imagine abandoning his subject or newfound mission for any others. Which means he’ll need more of that music in the years to come, as might those viewing his paintings.
“A lot of my work is grotesque,” Klein said, and that’s intentional. “I want to shake you up.”
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