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I spoke out against Mamdani. Then he won. Here’s how we walk forward together
Zohran Mamdani will become the 111th mayor of New York City. While the electoral outcome is not what I hoped for, I wish Mayor-elect Mamdani and his administration every success in leading this city we love. As the prophet Jeremiah instructed the Jews of his time, “Seek the peace of the city . . . for in its peace you will find your peace.”
Our community will, as it would with any mayor, work with the Mamdani administration on matters of shared concern and common cause. We will also, as we would with any mayor, hold the Mamdani administration accountable for ensuring that New York City remains a place where Jewish life and support for Israel are protected and can thrive.
Elections are important for the leaders they produce, but also for what they show us about the values we cherish and the fault lines we contain. They reveal not only the state of our politics, but the state of our souls, forcing each of us to confront questions of who we are, what we value, and how we can live together despite our differences.
For me, personally, the fact that about a third of New York City’s Jewish voters checked the box for Mamdani is totally bewildering. I am not unaware of the bigger political trends, the shortcomings of the other candidates, or the systemic challenges our city faces; I understand why Mamdani won. But for me, his anti-Zionist rhetoric and his intent to shut down research and economic partnerships between Israel and New York — to name but a few of his promises that would negatively impact our community — not only disqualified him from receiving my vote, but were a meaningful enough concern that I chose to publicly urge Jews and their allies to vote against him as well.
And yet, it would seem that what was self-evident to me was not so self-evident to a sizeable percentage of my kinfolk. Jews who live in my city, who are members of our collective community, who don’t feel the same way as I do. Thoughtful, caring, introspective Jews. Jews wise enough to interrogate their own views. Jews who, most importantly, fall into that sacred subset of humanity called mishpachah, family.
Mayors come and go. But the Jewish people must persist, and this election has brought a fault line within our people into full relief.
The rabbis of old understood that members of the same family could participate in the same experience and emerge with two very different ideas of what had occurred. It happened to our founding first family in this past week’s Torah reading, where we read the story of the akedah, the binding of Isaac.
Abraham is called on by God to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah. Not just once, but twice, the text says of their ascent of the mountain that the two “walked together.” The rabbis understand that repetition as deeply important, the choice of words signaling not just physical proximity, but shared understanding, purpose and faith.
By all accounts, whatever actually happened on top of that mountain was a moment both dramatic and traumatic for father and son alike. Yet as charged with emotion as the ascent and the scene atop the mountain were, it is the journey down that has elicited the most rabbinic commentary. The text describes Abraham returning to his servants, and then to Be’er Sheva.
No mention is made of Isaac. Where did he go? What happened to him? Abraham and Isaac may both have returned from the harrowing test on that mountain, but they went their separate ways and would never be the same. So betrayed was Isaac that he never spoke to his father again. The same akedah that defined Abraham as a hero of the Jewish faith was the experience that prompted Isaac to see him as unforgivable.
That divided outcome hits close to home as I reflect on the split within our New York Jewish community today. The story reminds us that trauma, while shared, can send members of the same family in opposite directions.
We need to recognize that while many of us felt compelled, after Oct. 7, to rise in defense of Israel and global Jewry, an unintended consequence has been that other Jews have chosen, like Isaac, a different route. We need a reset on what we mean when we talk about “Oct. 8” Jews. We must stop being surprised that the Isaacs of our community have found themselves more at home in the tents of others than in our own.
We need to learn to walk together again. If, as I have repeatedly claimed, ahavat yisrael — love of the Jewish people — is my North Star, then it is a principle I must uphold even and especially when it is uncomfortable to do so. It is a love that must extend to Jews whose views I neither share nor understand.
As I said a few weeks ago, when I chose to speak out against Mamdani, ahavat yisrael means not wagging fingers or rolling eyes when encountering opinions contrary to one’s own. It means refusing to demean, diminish, or shame another Jew’s viewpoint. It means spending time, as I have done on multiple occasions these past weeks, speaking with people who have shared why my remarks served to push them further from — not closer to — the Jewish fold.
It means calling out, with equal ferocity, the threats to the Jewish people as they appear on the Mamdani left and on the Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson right. And yes, it means a willingness to publicly apologize — not for sharing my convictions, on which I stand firm, but for the times I have failed to uphold the spirit of dialogue and freedom of conscience and expression that I have spent my adult life championing, and believe must be defended today more than ever.
It means modeling these values publicly and communally by engaging with peer rabbinic colleagues who see things differently than I do for respectful, substantive exchanges of views. It’s time to turn the temperature down, build bridges of dialogue, and strengthen the bonds of Jewish New York, even as we maintain our diversity of thought.
We must not let the tragedy of our first family become our own. In next week’s parsha, the Torah will offer a redemptive path forward, albeit one that comes too late for Abraham. Isaac, having established himself on his own, comes upon wells that his father dug, which stopped up after his father’s death. Isaac digs them anew, claiming them as his own, yet giving them the same names his father had given them.
That is an image worth meditating on, praying for, and not waiting for. A Jewish family coming together across difference, aspiring for unity without uniformity, and gaining the strength and humility to walk together again.
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EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements
(JTA) — The European Union could be leaning toward banning trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Foreign ministers debated various tactics to respond to the settlements on Monday at their monthly council meeting in Brussels, against the backdrop of rising violence by settlers and efforts by the Israeli government to expand settlements in Palestinian territories.
In a press conference following the meeting, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said one possibility had stood out.
“The option that got the most support was banning the trade with illegal settlements,” she said. All 27 member states consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank to violate international law.
Kallas added, “We tasked the ambassadors to take this work forward, and probably will also have an extraordinary meeting on this.”
No decisions have yet been made, and the path forward is uncertain. Some EU member nations favor aggressive action against the settlements, while others are unlikely to back any measures that take aim at Israel. A number are in the middle and have not decided whether they support trade bans.
The level of agreement between European governments needed to enact a partial or full trade ban on Israeli settlements remains an open question. Kallas said it was the European Council’s legal opinion that voting on trade issues called for a qualified majority, meaning that 15 out of 27 states would have to vote in favor, representing at least 65% of the EU population.
But she also acknowledged that legal experts disagreed about how much backing was needed for a trade ban. “You can always find different lawyers who come up with different ideas,” she said.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Kallas of an “obsessive campaign against Israel” in a post on X. “There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all,” he wrote, adding, “Tricks like this do nothing to advance our shared interests.”
The EU has hotly debated measures against Israel as settlements in the West Bank have expanded and settler violence has sharply intensified over recent years. The Israeli NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot said in a report last week that “the current Israeli government has advanced de facto annexation of the West Bank at an unprecedented pace.”
The ministers considered measures including a stricter export licensing system, higher tariffs and a partial or outright ban on goods produced over the pre-1967 lines. The options were first presented in a paper last week by the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, as pressure mounted from European governments.
Kallas said these potential moves were not “options against Israel,” but “options against the illegal settlements that undermined the two-state solution.” She told reporters before the meeting that member states had been pressing for a trade ban on Israeli settlements, saying, “Everyone agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable.”
In May, the EU sanctioned Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians after Hungary’s new government, led by Peter Magyar, gave its approval and allowed the states to reach a consensus.
To protest the Gaza war, the commission last year proposed suspending the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel as set out under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the cornerstone of economic and political cooperation between Europe and Israel. The proposal was not advanced because it lacked the majority support of 15 member states.
The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 33.1% of its imports and 29.4% of its exports in 2025, according to a summary on the European Commission website, which did not provide data on settler goods. The free trade agreement does not apply to goods originating from Israeli businesses located over the pre-1967 lines.
Revoking the association agreement requires unanimous approval from the EU’s 27 member states, while a partial suspension, such as freezing the free trade agreement, calls for a qualified majority. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Czechia have consistently opposed such suspensions.
Israel’s most vocal critics in Europe, including Ireland and Spain, have pushed for suspending the association agreement along with proposing their own import bans at the national level. Ireland now holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, a six-month term that ends in December 2026.
The legal basis of trade restrictions on Israel lies at the heart of debates in the EU. Support from a qualified majority is sufficient to enact a commercial policy, while changes in the common foreign and security policy — such as sanctions — require unanimity.
Some legal scholars have argued that an EU ban on imports from Israeli settlements should be imposed as a trade measure rather than a sanction, making it easier to pass.
A group of 40 scholars said in an open letter last month to Kallas, trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen that a blanket ban on settlement imports had a legal basis under the EU’s common commercial policy. Claims that unanimity was needed for the prohibition were “grounded in political rather than legal considerations,” they said.
The scholars also referenced an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in 2024, which said that Israel’s military control of Palestinian territories in the West Bank constituted an illegal occupation.
“In that regard, it should be noted that the EU Court of Justice has ruled that, in its acts, the EU is ‘bound to observe international law in its entirety,’” they said.
Daniel Mariaschin, Honorary CEO of the pro-Israel Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith International, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that reducing trade “would only weaken one of Europe’s most important partnerships in the region.”
“There are those within the EU who are looking for any way to undercut Israel’s international standing, and this is yet another example,” Mariaschin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
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Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
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