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‘Jews for Zohran’ knock doors as Mamdani’s past IDF comments resurface
This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 6 days to the election.
‘Jews for Zohran, including rabbis and Mandy Patinkin
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Jewish New Yorkers who support Zohran Mamdani are pushing back on the narrative that he threatens their safety, with dozens canvassing on the heavily Jewish Upper West Side over the weekend.
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Andrew Cuomo has centered the accusation that Mamdani would endanger Jews in his closing pitch to voters. But a group of canvassers wearing “New York Jews for Zohran” T-shirts said that Cuomo misunderstood the city’s Jewish population, according to The New York Times.
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Cuomo was “flattening” Jews, said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, a progressive anti-Zionist organization that has endorsed Mamdani. “He is talking about the Jewish community as though we have one political opinion and one voice. And that’s simply not true,” said Miller.
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Another JVP organizer, Eliza Klein, said the group aimed to show that Mamdani had “not fringe but mass Jewish support.” Recent polling indicates that Cuomo leads Mamdani with Jewish voters, though his margin has varied from 4% to 31% in different surveys.
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Cuomo has escalated his accusations against Mamdani in recent weeks. Last week, he described Mamdani’s “arrogance and antisemitism” at a synagogue event. He also told The Forward that concerns about Mamdani among Jews were “frighteningly high,” making them “more motivated than I have ever seen them in politics.”
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The “New York Jews for Zohran” are up against a chorus of prominent Jewish New Yorkers urging mobilization against Mamdani, along with more than 1,000 rabbis nationwide.
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In an ad shared Tuesday by the progressive group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a group of women rabbis said they were “among the thousands of Jewish New Yorkers who’ve been out door-knocking and phone-banking to elect Zohran Mamdani.”
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Famed Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin and his wife, actress Kathryn Grody, also backed Mamdani in a video with him released on Tuesday. Patinkin called Mamdani “an extraordinary human being” who would “lead our city and eventually, if we’re really thinking, our nation and the world to a better, safer, all-inclusive existence.” The couple previously condemned Israel’s war in Gaza and decried Jewish people who “allow this to happen.”
Mamdani’s comments about the NYPD and IDF resurface
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Mamdani is being criticized over comments he made during a 2023 Democratic Socialists of America panel in which he attributed police brutality in the United States to the Israeli army.
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“For anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local,” Mamdani, then as now a state legislator, said in the comments, which resurfaced in a clip this week. “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
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The comment appeared to channel anti-Zionist activists’ longstanding criticism of delegations of U.S. police officers who train with Israeli police and military services. The critics — including Jewish Voice for Peace, which published a 2018 report calling the trips a “Deadly Exchange” — say the delegations serve to import brutal policing techniques. Defenders of the delegations say the idea that Israel is responsible for police brutality in the United States represents an antisemitic canard that overlooks a history long predating Israel.
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Amid the controversy, Politico’s Jeff Coltin asked Mamdani if he would maintain the NYPD’s office in Israel yesterday. Mamdani replied, “My focus is here on the NYPD office in New York City. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”
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The clip joins another past comment in which Mamdani tied the IDF to local experiences in New York City. On a 2016 podcast, he recalled that an Israeli teacher he had in high school was “a graduate of the IDF” and thus “had tailed brown guys for a long time.”
Lining up to vote
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Our reporter Grace Gilson talked to voters in a heavily Sephardic Jewish neighborhood of South Brooklyn on Tuesday night. They lined up at a poll site that has been seeing one of the highest turnouts in the borough, according to local officials.
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One 28-year-old Orthodox voter from Gravesend said he cast his ballot for Cuomo, adding that his top priority was “safety” and opposing “defunding the police.” He believed that Republican Curtis Sliwa didn’t have enough experience, while Mamdani was “ignorant” and “wouldn’t even condemn the globalizing of intifada, which is ridiculous.”
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The polling site was in a neighborhood where schools and synagogues have said they were requiring proof of voter registration to participate.
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Shannon, a 45-year-old Modern Orthodox voter, said she also voted for Cuomo even though Sliwa was her preferred candidate. “We love Sliwa, but we know a vote for Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani because we learned that he has no chance,” she said. She believed that Mamdani supported “genocide” and turning New York into an “Islamic regime.”
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Shannon said her community pushed strongly to get out the vote. “Schools made sure everyone was registered to vote, everyone was on top of everyone, our shul, to make sure, especially now that it is so critical,” she said.
Numbers to know
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Mamdani continues to lead the race in a new poll from the Manhattan Institute, which showed him winning 46% of the vote, followed by 31% for Cuomo, 21% for Sliwa and 8% still undecided.
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The conservative-leaning think tank surveyed 600 likely New York City voters and had an error margin of 4%.
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The Manhattan Institute predicted that Cuomo would beat Mamdani by 13 points one week before the Democratic primary, which Mamdani won by over 7 points.
The antisemitism curriculum that Mamdani supports
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Mamdani announced during the last mayoral debate that he would implement “Hidden Voices,” a school program that teaches New York City students about Jewish American history. (The curriculum became available to schools this year.)
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“Hidden Voices” uses different language about Israel and Zionism than Mamdani, according to a review by The Forward.
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The program defines Zionism as “the right to Jewish national self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” Mamdani has said that he is “not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.” He supports the right of Israel to exist not as a Jewish state, but as a state “with equal rights for all.”
Endorsement tracker
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Former New York Gov. David Paterson endorsed Cuomo yesterday. He backed Cuomo in the primary, then switched to incumbent Mayor Eric Adams in the general election — and now he is back on Cuomo’s side. Adams dropped out last month and has also endorsed Cuomo.
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Sliwa said to Politico that Paterson was “the kiss of death politically.” Paterson is married to one of Sliwa’s ex-wives and a stepfather to Sliwa’s son — but not the Jewish ones.
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The post ‘Jews for Zohran’ knock doors as Mamdani’s past IDF comments resurface appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Says It Kills Senior Hamas Commander Raed Saed in Gaza
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a car in Gaza City, December 13, 2025.REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
The Israeli military said it killed senior Hamas commander Raed Saed, one of the architects of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, in a strike on a car in Gaza City on Saturday.
It was the highest-profile assassination of a senior Hamas figure since a Gaza ceasefire deal came into effect in October.
In a joint statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said Saed was targeted in response to an attack by Hamas in which an explosive device injured two soldiers earlier on Saturday.
The attack on the car in Gaza City killed five people and wounded at least 25 others, according to Gaza health authorities. There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas or medics that Saed was among the dead.
HAMAS SAYS ATTACK VIOLATES CEASEFIRE AGREEMENT
An Israeli military official described Saed as a high-ranked Hamas member who helped establish and advance the group’s weapons production network.
“In recent months, he operated to reestablish Hamas’ capabilities and weapons manufacturing, a blatant violation of the ceasefire,” the official said.
Hamas sources have also described him as the second-in-command of the group’s armed wing, after Izz eldeen Al-Hadad.
Saed used to head Hamas’ Gaza City battalion, one of the group’s largest and best-equipped, those sources said.
Hamas, in a statement, condemned the attack as a violation of the ceasefire agreement but did not say whether Saed was hurt and stopped short of threatening retaliation.
The October 10 ceasefire has enabled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return to Gaza City’s ruins. Israel has pulled troops back from city positions, and aid flows have increased.
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Hezbollah Chief: Disarmament Would Be ‘Death Sentence’ for Lebanon
Lebanon’s Hezbollah Chief Naim Qassem gives a televised speech from an unknown location, July 30, 2025, in this screen grab from video. Photo: Al Manar TV/REUTERS TV/via REUTERS
i24 News – Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said on Saturday that it was not the responsibility of the Shiite terror group “to prevent aggression,” but rather the Lebanese state’s, and it is the responsibility of Hezbollah to engage “when the state and army fail to do so.”
In a recorded televised statement, Qassem sarcastically posed the question whether it was not Hezbollah that should be demanding the Lebanese Army’s disarmament if the latter fails to stop “Israel’s ongoing aggression.”
On the issue of disarming Hezbollah, Qassem said that disarming it in the manner currently proposed is a death sentence for Lebanon.
“Even if the sky falls, we will not be disarmed, not even if the entire world unites against Lebanon. We will not allow this and it will not happen,” Qassem said.
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High schoolers’ ‘human swastika’ on football field shakes San Jose Jewish community
(JTA) — The photo spread swiftly after a student posted it on social media: Eight California high schoolers were lying on their school’s football field, their bodies arrayed in the shape of a swastika.
Alongside the picture was a quote from Adolf Hitler, threatening the “annihilation of the Jewish race.”
The incident at Branham High School in San Jose began on Dec. 3 and has roiled the local Jewish community in the days since, as the wrenching saga has ignited suspensions, recriminations and alarm from around the world.
The photograph and the response to it were first reported by J. Jewish News of Northern California.
“We don’t want to see hatred,” Cormac Nolan, a Jewish Branham senior, told the local Jewish newspaper. “We don’t want to see the idolization of one of the most evil men to ever walk the face of the Earth. We don’t want someone who spews out hatred like this on our campus.”
The school’s student newspaper reported that the students involved had been suspended, and that dozens of other students walked out to protest the incident.
The San Jose Police Department told J. that it is investigating the incident, and the school’s principal, Beth Silbergeld, who is Jewish, said the school was working with the Anti-Defamation League and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, a local antisemitism advocacy group, “to ensure that we receive appropriate support and guidance as we work to repair the harm that’s been done to our community.”
Silbergeld told J. that she felt pressure to learn from the incident.
“I’ve been in education for a long time and have seen, sadly, lots of incidences of oppression and hate toward many groups,” she said. “I think that we always have a responsibility as schools to do what’s right and to take action and learn from the experiences of other other schools and other incidents as a way to hopefully eliminate actions like what we’ve experienced.”
The incident is not the first time Branham High School has faced controversy over antisemitism on its campus. In April, the California Department of Education ruled that the school had discriminated against its Jewish students by presenting “biased” content about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a 12th-grade ethnic literature curriculum.
It is also not the first instance of a “human swastika” roiling a school community. In 2019, nine middle schoolers in Ojai, California, also arranged themselves in a “human swastika” and faced disciplinary measures from the school.
Exactly what possessed the Branham students to do what they did is not clear. But psychologists told the J. that the teen years are a peak moment for transgressive behaviors that may or may not reflect deep-seated biases.
“It’s a developmental time where you’re doing new things, you’re trying new things, you’re making mistakes, you’re trying to fit in, you’re trying to get laughs and likes,” Ellie Pelc, director of clinical services at the Bay Area’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services, told the newspaper. “And you often do so in some hurtful or harmful ways that you don’t always have the capacity to think through in advance.”
The photo was met by condemnation by California State Sens. Scott Wiener, who wrote that antisemitism was “pervasive & growing” in a post on Facebook, and Dave Cortese, who said he was “deeply disturbed” by the incident in a statement.
“What happened at Branham High School was not a joke, not a prank, and not self-expression — it was an act of hatred,” wrote San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan in a post on X. “The fact that this was planned and posted publicly makes it even more disturbing.”
By Tuesday, the uproar had sparked a response from district leaders. In a post on Facebook, Robert Bravo, the superintendent for the Campbell Union High School District, wrote that the district “will respond firmly, thoughtfully, and within the full scope allowed by Board Policy and California law.” (Displaying a Nazi swastika on the property of a school is illegal in California.)
He added that the school district considered the incident an instance of “hate violence” based on California state education code, which allows for suspension or expulsion in such cases.
“Our response cannot be limited to discipline alone,” continued Bravo. “We are committed to using this incident as an opportunity to deepen education around antisemitism, hate symbols and the historical atrocities associated with them.”
The antisemitic post comes two months after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill creating a statewide office assigned to combatting antisemitism in California public schools. The office, which is the first of its kind in the country, was met with praise from local Jewish advocacy groups while some critics warned it could chill academic freedoms.
Marc Levine, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in the Central Pacific region, called the incident “repulsive and unacceptable” in a statement on X. The incident was also condemned by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area, which wrote in a statement that it had been working with the school about “how to ensure an effective response.”
The Bay Area Jewish Coalition also issued a statement on Tuesday, writing that the antisemitic act had “shaken Jewish families across Northern California and beyond.”
“We hope that what happened at Branham serves as a wake-up call for California and for the rest of the country to take the antisemitism crisis seriously and reverse the trend through real, meaningful action and long-term change,” the statement continued.
The post High schoolers’ ‘human swastika’ on football field shakes San Jose Jewish community appeared first on The Forward.