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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 administration drops demand that Penn turn over list of Jewish employees
(JTA) — The Trump administration has withdrawn a controversial demand for the University of Pennsylvania to produce a list of Jewish employees as part of a larger investigation into alleged employment discrimination at the Ivy League university.
The withdrawal ends a round of lawsuits over the legality of such a demand, which alarmed Jewish groups on campus and beyond.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is overseeing the probe, did not explain its decision to drop the subpoena in its Thursday court filing. A representative for the agency declined further comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In its own statement, Penn, which had been engaged in a legal back-and-forth over the school’s refusal to compile such a list, said it had “protected its employees’ rights.” The school had shared the names of Jewish staff who had consented to the probe, but resisted sharing the names of all Jewish staff.
“Penn remains committed to fighting antisemitism and all other forms of discrimination, to ensure everyone it serves can learn, work, and thrive,” a university spokesperson said.
The unusual demand, first made in November, came as the Trump administration has aggressively targeted a handful of elite schools accused of failing to curb antisemitism on campus. Most of the time, its intervention has come through the education and health and human services departments, which have cited civil rights violations in seeking to yank billions of dollars in federal funding.
But the EEOC has gotten involved, too, arguing that Penn, in particular, had failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli employees from discrimination. Its case against Penn originated in 2023, and its subpoena had included demands to reveal members of “all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation groups” that were “related to the Jewish religion, faith, ancestry/national origin.” The subpoena also targeted the school’s Jewish studies personnel.
Jewish groups, including Penn Hillel, had argued against the demand, as did free-speech organizations. In an email, Penn Hillel’s director, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg, told JTA the organization welcomed the news.
“Over the past year, I have spoken with hundreds of students, faculty, and staff across the University of Pennsylvania regarding this issue. Every single person expressed objections to the EEOC’s attempt to compel the University to surrender data on Jewish identity and affiliation,” Greenberg said.
He continued, “While many in our community share Penn Hillel’s conviction that campus antisemitism requires urgent, sustained action, demanding ‘lists of Jews’ was a fundamentally incorrect and inappropriate way to address it.”
Earlier this year the agency chair, Andrea Lucas, defended the list-of-Jews demand during an antisemitism conference at Harvard. Lucas told the roomful of Jewish professionals that her office needed the list to identify “potential victims,” including as a means of distributing potential payouts.
(L-r) Andrea Lucas, chair of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, speaks with Brandeis Center founder Kenneth Marcus at an antisemitism conference held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 16, 2026. (Dillon Meyer Media)
“At some point, either the government will know information about individuals related to their religion or we will not be able to enforce the laws on their behalf,” Lucas said at the time.
A federal judge had ruled in March that the request was reasonable, dismissing efforts by Penn and Jewish groups to declare the ruling unconstitutional. However, the judge delayed the deadline by which Penn would have been forced to comply, giving the university more time to appeal.
The EEOC’s larger antisemitism inquiry into Penn continues.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Austrian town turns Hitler’s birthplace into a police station to keep neo-Nazis at bay
(JTA) — How do you stop neo-Nazis from meeting up at Adolf Hitler’s birthplace? Station officers there around the clock, of course.
That is just what the small town of Braunau in Austria has done — but the officers are not providing surveillance. Instead, they will be on site as part of their regular duties, because Hitler’s first home has become a police station.
After years of discussion, planning and construction, the new police station on a corner near Braunau’s town square opened July 22, in the house where the future Nazi dictator was born in 1889 and spent the first few months of his life.
The building looks different, and there will now be surveillance cameras out front. The city’s aim was “to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique,” the head of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a recent tour.
At Wednesday’s opening ceremony, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner emphasized that today’s police are “the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand … for democracy and the rule of law,” The Associated Press reported.
Some 50 local and district police officers will be stationed at the new site. And there will also reportedly be a police training program on issues related to human rights.
“They will probably also do antisemitism training. And I think that’s a good thing,” Hannah Lessing, who was on the expert commission to decide what should be done with the property, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview. Lessing, who co-chairs the Austrian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, was opposed to tearing down the building:
Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau, Austria, as seen on Jan. 15, 2015, as the Austrian government considered forcing a sale to prevent the site’s misuse. A commemorative plaque denouncing fascism was preserved during a later renovation into a police station. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
“I don’t like historical cancellation. But we should use it for something,” she said. “A museum was for me not a good idea, because it would attract automatically people who are probably Hitler fans.”
Thomas Ulmer is a retired officer with the Stuttgart police who fought to turn a former Gestapo headquarters in his German city into a place of remembrance. He said the new site could benefit the officers who are stationed there.
“It’s very important to convey the memory and the history to young people, to young police trainees,” he said.
Today — as an activist in the VelsPol advocacy organization for queer staff in the police and justice system — Ulmer brings police recruits to the Hotel Silber Memorial and Learning Center, where they learn how police were co-opted into the Nazi machine.
Recently, he helped design an exhibit in another former Hitler dwelling that became a police station: a nine-room apartment on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. The exhibit, which spanned 100 years of history, included the years in which Hitler’s popularity grew after the Beer Hall Putsch, his attempted coup in 1923.
The Munich station’s head, Andreas Franken, doesn’t hide the building’s history, Ulmer said. In his office, Franken even has the famous photo of the American war photographer Lee Miller sitting in Hitler’s bathtub.
“When people come to him, whether they’re new police officers or just other people, they always ask him about this picture, and then he can tell the story of the building again,” Ulmer said.
Back in Braunau, the new police station “will continue to be known as ‘Hitler’s birthplace’ and will attract visitors accordingly,” laments Austrian filmmaker Günter Schwaiger, who had opposed the plan back in 2023. In his documentary, “Who’s afraid of Braunau?”, he claimed that Hitler himself wanted to have local officials move into the rooms where he was born.
“It used to be a modest house, but now the Austrian government has turned it into a monument,” he said in an email to the JTA. “We probably need a different generation — one that isn’t afraid of the truth and has the courage to truly come to terms with the past. I hope that generation will emerge.”
A swastika flag flies outside the birthplace of Adolf Hitler in Braunau, Austria, around 1933. (Imagno/Getty Images)
Also disappointed is California attorney Cary Lowe, who was born in Braunau to Holocaust survivors. He was originally in favor of turning the site into a “House of Responsibility.” That plan is still alive, with another local site in mind. The city did “their best to come up with a result that’s acceptable to everybody,” he said. “And now it’s a done deal, so I think we just have to move on.”
The building where Hitler was born dates back to the early to mid-19th century and sits, along with some other structures, on about three quarters of an acre. It has been privately owned, and over the years has housed a school and a branch of a disability support organization.
In 1989, a memorial stone taken from the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp was erected in front of the house, and inscribed with a warning “Never again fascism.” Noticeable visits by neo-Nazis declined since then, Cary Lowe told JTA.
“Yes, they still get the occasional individual that wants to carry out a pilgrimage or do a photo op or something in front of the house,” he said. “But it’s on a much smaller scale.”
Braunau’s mayor, Johannes Waidbacher, stands outside the renovated police station in Hitler’s birthplace, July 16, 2026. (Photo by Kerstin Joensson / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2017, the city of Braunau expropriated the vacant property and organized an expert commission to debate possible uses, or even demolition. Suggestions ranged from the serious — a museum — to the wild: An Austrian artist collective called Total Refusal suggested that a controversial statue of Vienna’s wartime mayor Karl Luegers, a devoted antisemite, be picked up by helicopter and dropped over Hitler’s birth house.
But that was not to be. After deciding on the police station option, renovation began. Even then, the idea that Hitler fanatics might seek relics led the city to grind down all the construction rubble and bury it in a secret location.
Lessing hopes that the new police station will reach the younger generation, with lessons of the past accessible in Braunau without having to journey to concentration camp sites in the region.
“We didn’t need another museum,” she said. “We have Mauthausen for that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Stabbing of Jewish man in Manhattan prompts calls for Mamdani to turn down temperature
The stabbing of two men on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Thursday — one of whom was wearing a kippah on his way home from a Tisha B’Av service at a modern Orthodox shul — has intensified New Yorkers’ fears of being visibly Jewish in public, leaders and community members said.
“Fear has become a lived experience for far too many Jewish New Yorkers. That is not normal,” Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said at a press conference Friday near the location of the stabbing. “Today, Jewish parents are asking whether it is safe for their children to wear a kippah or a Magen David in public. Synagogues preparing for Shabbat are wondering whether they can afford additional security.”
Police said on Thursday afternoon, the suspect — identified as 51-year-old Raul Morales — stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife before approaching a Jewish man and stabbing him in the torso with a screwdriver. Authorities said he yelled “Allahu akbar” during the attack. Both victims are expected to recover.
Morales is expected to face charges on Friday. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime, and New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a statement Thursday that while the attacker did not have a known history of mental health issues, “the initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the attack as “horrifying” and wrote on X that “these hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city.”
At Friday’s press conference, City Council Speaker Julie Menin said she was having conversations with her daughter about whether it was safe to wear a Jewish star and with her sons about whether they should wear yarmulkes.
“How can this be normal?” Menin said. “We have to change what is happening in our city.”
But even as New York Attorney General Letitia James urged people not to “assign any particular outcome to this investigation,” adding she did not want to “draw any conclusions,” some leaders were quick to link the attack to a rising political temperature.
Some directly expressed their anger with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who on Wednesday issued a video address conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Unable to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The UJA-Federation of New York and Orthodox Union said at the time that the mayor’s words put Jews in greater danger.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, wrote in an open letter addressed to Mamdani that “you promised during and after your campaign to lead this city with unity rather than fear. Instead, you continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”
Mamdani was not at the press conference, and organizers did not answer a question about whether he had been invited.
“His words have profound, real-world consequence on us,” Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, told the crowd. “Shame on him for doing this for perceived political benefit when it has real-world consequence for the Jews of New York. He must stop. He must stop.”
Rabbi Yosie Levine of the Jewish Center — where the victim had attended a Tisha B’Av service before he was stabbed — also expressed disappointment at Mamdani’s remarks.
“When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or outside of my Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak,” Levine said. “The police were there to protect him. Today, every time the mayor speaks, we need the police to protect us.”
“No elected official is responsible for every act of hate, but every leader is responsible for helping shape the climate in which we all live,” Treyger said.
New York City Comptroller Mark Levine at Friday’s press conference cast the attack as part of a broader trend of rising attacks on Jewish New Yorkers, citing 178 acts of antisemitic hate crimes in the first six months of this year.
Menin pointed to the dozens of swastikas painted on a playground at a Brooklyn playground earlier this year and swastikas spray painted on homes and a synagogue in Queens last month. On Wednesday, a Jewish man was shoved to the ground in Brooklyn, with the attacker making antisemitic remarks, leaving the victim with back and hip injuries.
Thursday’s attacks were just the latest in a series of crimes targeting the Jewish community, they said.
Rabbi Mark Wildes of the Manhattan Jewish Experience told the Forward he was teaching his weekly class when the attacks occurred nearby.
“It literally happened on my block,” he said. “Two of my kids were out and about, and this guy was still at large before they had caught him.” Wildes, whose children are visibly Jewish, said he and his wife immediately tried to get them home. “We were saying, ‘Where are they? Get them inside.’”
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