Many Jewish New Yorkers are hoping that Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy is an aberration and that Democrats will soon return to candidates who embrace a close alliance with Israel and express a heartfelt understanding of the relationship many American Jews feel toward the country.

That aspiration describes many of the city’s most prominent Democratic officials, from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, to Reps. Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman. Eric Adams, the outgoing mayor, also fits the bill.

For these Jews, defeating Mamdani is especially urgent because loss could hasten a return to this norm, while a victory could signal a more permanent shift.

“Mamdani poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community,” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove told Park Avenue Synagogue congregants in his Shabbat sermon Saturday. “And if you play out the chess game of Democratic politics, a danger that could have much wider consequences.”

For Jews like Cosgrove, Mamdani’s political positions are the problem — they view his opposition to Zionism as antisemitic, and his efforts to reassure the Jewish community as an implicit confession that Jews would have something to worry about if he was in charge.

Other leaders, like Rabbi Rachel Timoner at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, are making a different calculation. Her synagogue hosted Mamdani for a private conversation with members, part of his Jewish outreach that has included synagogue and sukkah visits plus private meetings with clergy.

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The divergent approaches — rallying congregants against Mamdani versus engaging with the candidate — showcase two different models for handling political candidates who are hostile toward Israel.

Timoner said she owed it to her congregants to bring Mamdani to the synagogue for a conversation. “I’m hoping that he is going to listen with an open mind and an open heart to the real pain and fear and experience of the Jewish community,” she told JTA.

Cosgrove acknowledged that Mamdani was likely to win but said that was no reason to try and extend an olive branch. “I understand the pragmatic instinct,” he said. “I choose principle instead.”

I expect many more Jewish leaders will be confronting this hard decision in the years to come, because polling shows that Mamdani’s views toward Israel are starting to align with a majority of Democratic voters.

Three times more Democrats in New York City sympathize with the Palestinians over Israel (57% to 18%), while nationally 69% of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Israel.

Sympathizing with Palestinians is not the same thing as opposing Israel’s existence, but 67% of Democrats also think Israel’s military actions in Gaza should be defined as either genocide or major war crimes akin to genocide, while only 7% considered them to be legitimate self-defense, a stance that does call Israel’s legitimacy into question.

And while many party leaders remain stalwart supporters of Israel, there is evidence some are starting to feel the heat. Sen. Cory Booker squirmed during an interview with liberal podcaster Jennifer Welch last week as she grilled him on receiving donations from AIPAC and taking a friendly photograph with Benjamin Netanyahu over the summer. “‘What in the actual f—-?” Welch asked.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, has been tagged “AIPAC Shakur” by popular radio host Charlamagne Tha God, and recently accepted an endorsement from J Street, a liberal AIPAC alternative, while other prominent Democrats are turning down AIPAC funding.

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The pressure may ease if the ceasefire holds in Gaza, but it’s hard to see the overall trends reversing without an improbable breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

That suggests the kind of red lines that Jewish leaders have long sought to maintain around Israel and antisemitism — opposing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, for example — will start to lose their power.

If more Mamdanis start running for office, will concerned Jewish leaders shift their focus from these candidates’ views on Israel to how they treat their Jewish constituents?

One of the themes I’ve found in reporting on campus antisemitism is that students are often bothered more by how some of their peers act out their anger toward Israel — often by shunning Jews who don’t completely buy into anti-Zionism — than by the anger itself.

Is there anything that candidates who oppose Israel can offer Jewish leaders and voters who support Israel, short of changing their foreign policy positions?

Mamdani has tried. In addition to his charm offensive, he has sought to reassure Jews in New York City that he will not demonize Jews he disagrees with, telling Beth Elohim members that he would not impose a litmus test around Israel at City Hall and anticipated hiring Zionists of all different political persuasions if elected.

That comment only served to provoke Cosgrove, who said Mamdani had revealed an “assumption that Jewish self-determination is an ideology to be tolerated, rather than a birthright to be respected.”

But perhaps it comforted some of those in the audience at Beth Elohim.

Of course, Mamdani is still in campaign mode. The bigger test will come if he wins. How a Mayor Mamdani would ultimately relate to the city’s Jews— and whether antisemitic incidents spike, fall or remain flat — will almost certainly inform how other rabbis and Jewish leaders react to future candidates who share his views.

The post If Mamdani is the future of the Democratic party, how will Jews respond? appeared first on The Forward.

Instead of going to therapy, a widower escapes his trauma by fleeing to an island halfway between Antarctica and Tasmania, where he’s supposed to be taking care of a broken seed vault meant to protect the global food supply against disaster. But various emotional and environmental twists get in the way of his success.

Published earlier this year, Charlotte McConaghy’s climate thriller Wild Dark Shore is the latest entrant in a genre that updates the Noah’s Ark story. It joins the Hulu series Paradise, set in an underground bunker in Colorado after a doomsday event, and the movie Interstellar, where astronauts bearing frozen embryos set off in search of a habitable planet. And then there’s Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars.

Wild Dark Shore is a little different, because the life forms that need to be protected from climate disaster are plants, not animals. “It was meant to outlast humanity,” McConaghy writes of the fictional Shearwater Global Seed Vault that her main character, Dom, has to protect, “to live on into the future in the event that people should one day need to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” In other words, a Noah’s Ark of seeds.

But one irony of climate change is that it threatens the very work humanity does to protect against it. The vault is supposed to remain frozen, but a storm damages its cooling system. Because of rising sea levels, the vault is being flooded, and even fewer seeds can be saved than Dom and the other characters once believed.

In the Noah’s Ark story, Noah can propagate every species, but individual people and animals left behind are drowned. In Wild Dark Shore, only some seeds can be rescued — however many as can be jammed into a small freezer — and part of the challenge is deciding which seeds to save and which ones to allow to go extinct.

Should they pick seeds based on their capacity to nourish the human species, like wheat? Dom’s youngest child has a soft spot for less consequential yet still cool seeds, like that of the wollemia nobilis, a (real-life) evergreen tree that was thought to have been extinct for millions of years then discovered in Australia in 1994.

The seed vault in the book is loosely based on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle, whose tunnel flooded in 2016 due to melting permafrost, or frozen soil, during an extremely hot (for that part of the world) winter. (Thankfully, no seeds were lost.) The vault opened in 2008 and is owned and operated by the Norwegian government. With over 1.3 million seed samples, it’s the world’s largest facility of its kind.

The mental gymnastics necessary to picture a world so radically different, so much worse, than one’s own, is part of what makes science fiction compelling. Mentally, most people struggle to fathom what scientists tell us about the changing climate. Environmental disaster seems too abstract, too far away, and too unpleasant to think about. Books and movies create a mental safe space where we can begin to see what’s at stake.

The Noah’s Ark story takes place long before anyone ever thought about carbon emissions, but it still offers a blueprint for science fiction. “Whether we want to or not, we keep retelling a version of that story every time we imagine what it’s like to survive disaster,” said Jeffrey Cohen, an English professor and the author of Noah’s Arkive, a series of essays analyzing the biblical story through the lens of modern times. “One of the things that the ark gifted the imagination forever with is a kind of self-contained survival-ship. Without the ark, we wouldn’t have spaceships.”

Without spoiling too much of Wild Dark Shore, I’d argue the best lesson climate thrillers offer is that we as a society are emotionally unsuited for the pressures doomsday could place on us. Our best bet is to avoid any situation where our species’ fate winds up in the hands of a traumatized widower, Elon Musk, or any other modern-day Noah — to create a future where everybody can be saved, because there is nothing to be saved from.

The post Why the story of Noah’s Ark seems timelier than ever appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The Republican nominee for New Jersey governor has come after one of his aides said he wasn’t “taking money from Jews” at a campaign event.

Ibrar Nadeem, the Muslim relations adviser to Jack Ciattarelli, made the remarks at a “community dinner” in Piscataway, New Jersey, on Saturday organized by a group called Muslims 4 Jack.

“People from my community, when I was blamed that somebody said, ‘You are taking money from Jews.’ I said, ‘I check my bank account every day, brother, it is not there,’” Nadeem told the crowd.

Minutes earlier, Nadeem also said that Ciattarelli’s campaign wanted to have a “ban on same-sex marriage.”

#NJ gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli is getting an endorsement so big, it might lead to victory (Lakewood Vaad). He made an appearance with Muslims4Jack too “We want to have a ban on same-sex marriage…I was blamed that somebody said you are taking money from Jews.” https://t.co/3Lz4jHXWQv pic.twitter.com/ap71tBQEX9

— Michael Matthews (@mcm1071989) October 20, 2025

Following Nadeem’s remarks, Ciattarelli took to the stage and praised Nadeem, telling the crowd that the advisor “hasn’t let me down one day” since the pair met eight months ago. He also boasted that he was the “first gubernatorial candidate in history that has a Muslim as part of his inner circle of advisors.”

Both men’s remarks swiftly drew criticism from Ciattarelli’s opponent, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who is currently leading the race by single digits in most public polling.

“This blatant antisemitism is coming from a member of Jack’s inner circle,” wrote Sherrill in a post on X Monday. “Jack could have condemned it but instead sang his praises. Absolutely disgraceful.”

Hours later, she demanded that Ciattarelli denounce Nadeem’s comments, fire him and apologize for “praising him right after he made these antisemitic and homophobic statements” in another social media post.

Ciattarelli’s response to Nadeem’s comments also drew condemnation from Jewish Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who lost his gubernatorial bid to Sherrill earlier this year.

“A real friend of the Jewish community doesn’t applaud disgusting antisemitic tropes,” Gottheimer told reporters Tuesday. “They condemn them.”

In response to Sherrill’s allegations, Ciattarelli accused the Democratic candidate of being a “Mamdani supporter” — a reference to the Muslim and anti-Zionist Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City — who didn’t “have the moral courage to stand with Israel.”

“Do you ever get tired of lying @MikieSherrill? You know I support same sex marriage. You also know the full clip of Dr. Nadeem’s remarks are clear: He was talking about the grief he gets from some BECAUSE of my unwavering support for the Jewish community and Israel and his own efforts to build bridges between Muslim and non-Muslim communities,” wrote Ciattarelli in a post on X.

The Vaad, a group of Orthodox community leaders in Lakewood, New Jersey, and neighboring towns, is expected to endorse Ciattarelli in the coming days, according to the Lakewood Scoop.

Nadeem thanked Ciattarelli for his defense in a post on Facebook where he claimed he had worked to foster ties between Muslim and Jewish communities in New Jersey.

“Mikie Sherrill, your attacks are false. I’ve spent years building bridges—especially between Muslim and Jewish communities—and I’m proud of that work,” wrote Nadeem. “To my Jewish friends, thank you for standing with me and rejecting division. Truth and unity will beat political lies—every time. 🇺🇸”

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