New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

When a single election lays bare a community’s conscience, it deserves more than punditry.

The recent victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York’s Democratic primary was more than a political surprise. It was a sociological revelation — a moment that exposed the moral divide within American Jewry and the fragility of its civic cohesion.

The Times of Israel exit poll tells the story plainly: roughly 63 percent of Jewish voters supported Andrew Cuomo, while a third backed Mamdani, the far-left candidate known for his fierce criticism of Israel and his support for the BDS movement. But the aggregate numbers obscure something more profound. Beneath the data lies a moral geography that splits the community itself; between Brooklyn’s progressive brownstones and Manhattan’s traditional bastions, between younger universalists and older particularists, between two rival moral languages of what it means to be Jewish in America.

In the brownstone belts of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Clinton Hill, Mamdani dominated. His margins in some precincts approached 90 percent. These are neighborhoods filled with young professionals, educators, and creatives: Jews who are largely non-Orthodox, highly educated, and politically left-leaning.

They belong to a generation whose moral formation occurred as much on social media as in synagogue pews. Across the East River, in Borough Park, Crown Heights, and the Upper East Side, Cuomo’s support exceeded 80 percent. These precincts are wealthier, older, and denser, with day-school graduates, Federation donors, and Israel mission alumni. One city, two moral worlds.

Political psychology offers a framework for understanding this divergence.

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham’s Moral Foundations Theory describes human moral reasoning as rooted in several intuitive “foundations.” The first pair — Care and Fairness — orient toward empathy, equality, and the mitigation of harm. The second set — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — prioritize group solidarity, respect for tradition, and the protection of what is sacred.

Liberals, Haidt’s research found, tend to emphasize the individualizing foundations of care and fairness; conservatives draw upon all five, including those that bind the group together. These moral instincts operate beneath conscious ideology, shaping the stories people tell about justice, duty, and belonging.

Applied to Jewish life, this model illuminates the Mamdani divide. The younger, Park Slope cohort embodies the individualizing moral style. Their Judaism is ethical universalism — a faith of empathy, repair, and inclusion. To them, Jewish history teaches solidarity with the marginalized, not tribal defense. Their political commitments — tenant rights, climate action, anti-racism, and Palestinian solidarity — feel like moral extensions of their Jewish conscience.

Supporting Mamdani, in this light, is not an act of betrayal but an act of consistency. The Upper East Side cohort, by contrast, lives in the binding moral register. Their Judaism centers on loyalty to the Jewish people, reverence for institutions, and defense of Israel as a sacred trust. When a candidate denounces Israel as genocidal, they hear not critique but violation. The vote for Cuomo was not a calculation of interests; it was an affirmation of covenant.

Survey data confirm that these moral worlds align with generational and institutional divides. Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey found that only 45 percent of Jews under 35 hold a favorable view of Israel’s government, compared with 64 percent among those over 50.

Yet nearly 90 percent across all ages still view the Israeli people positively, suggesting alienation not from Israel itself but from its political expression.

Pew’s 2021 study showed that 58 percent of American Jews feel emotionally attached to Israel, though that attachment rises to 82 percent among the Orthodox and drops below 60 percent among Reform and unaffiliated Jews. Twenty-two percent now believe the United States is too supportive of Israel — twice the share in 2013 — and that sentiment is concentrated among younger and unaffiliated

Jews. Another 2024 survey by the Benenson Strategy Group found that nearly four in five American Jews still feel close to Israel, and 72 percent say Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, yet 62 percent admit they “sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel or its government.” The picture that emerges is not rejection but tension: enduring identity, waning confidence, moral ambivalence.

This moral bifurcation has deep civic consequences. For much of the 20th century, American Jews reconciled universal and particular obligations through robust institutions. Federations linked philanthropy for the poor to support for Israel. Synagogues fused civic virtue with covenantal belonging. Community centers cultivated the habits of service, dialogue, and shared space.

Those integrative structures made it possible to balance empathy and loyalty within a single communal framework. But as institutional participation has declined, moral formation now occurs in fragmented spaces — online, on campuses, within activist networks — where individual conscience replaces institutional mediation. The result is that empathy and loyalty, once twin pillars of Jewish civic life, now compete rather than complement.

When moral authority fragments, politics becomes identity by proxy. The universalist moral vocabulary of younger Jews often renders Jewish power suspect; the particularist vocabulary of their elders renders dissent heretical. The two sides no longer disagree over policy; they inhabit different moral cosmologies. That is why the Mamdani election felt seismic to the Jewish community and New York City more generally. It revealed, not created, the split between what might be called the “individualizing Jew” and the “binding Jew” — one who sees Judaism as a moral compass for humanity, the other who sees it as the covenantal anchor of a people.

The consequences are not merely internal. A cohesive Jewish community has long served as a vital civic intermediary, connecting minority experience to national ideals. Fragmentation weakens that role. When a third of Jewish voters champion a candidate who accuses Israel of genocide and two-thirds recoil in outrage, institutional consensus becomes nearly impossible. Jewish organizations struggle to articulate shared positions on campus speech, antisemitism, or Israel policy because the moral foundations beneath those debates differ.

The binding moral language of loyalty and sanctity, once the lingua franca of Jewish life, now strikes many younger Jews as exclusionary or even coercive. Yet without it, solidarity itself erodes.

This tension certainly mirrors the broader democratic malaise. Across the West, younger generations are shifting from binding to individualizing moral frameworks — from “who we are” to “whom we protect.” That shift, born of compassion, often dissolves the collective bonds that sustain civic trust. The Jewish community’s fracture is thus a microcosm of the American one. If one of the nation’s most institutionally successful minorities cannot sustain moral coherence across generations, the prospects for the larger democracy are sobering.

Still, Jewish tradition offers a path forward. The Hebrew Bible itself balances competing moral imperatives: love the stranger (Care), pursue justice (Fairness), remember you were slaves in Egypt (Loyalty), honor your parents (Authority), and be holy (Sanctity). The moral genius of Judaism has always been its capacity to integrate rather than choose. A renewed Jewish civic life would recover that synthesis — not by diluting conviction, but by translating between moral dialects.

Doing so requires moral bilingualism. Jewish leaders must learn to speak both the language of empathy and the language of obligation. They must show younger Jews that loyalty need not mean blind allegiance, and show older Jews that care need not mean disavowal. Institutions that can bridge those vocabularies — pairing service projects with Jewish learning, coupling justice work with covenantal memory — will thrive. Those that cannot will wither into echo chambers. The task is to rebuild spaces where the moral foundations overlap, where the passion for fairness coexists with respect for continuity, and where dissent strengthens rather than fractures community.

The Mamdani election dramatized the challenge. It showed that American Jews are not divided between left and right so much as between two moral imaginations.

The future of American Jewish life — and perhaps something of American civic life itself — depends on reuniting those halves. The task is not to pick sides between the moral foundations, but to recover their harmony. That would mean re-embedding compassion within community and rooting loyalty in moral reflection. It would mean building institutions capable of moral translation rather than moral policing. It would mean acknowledging that Jewish flourishing and democratic stability alike require both conscience and covenant.

The Mamdani election did not create this divide, it exposed it. The challenge now is whether American Jews can build a third moral script, one that joins care to continuity, justice to responsibility, empathy to endurance. That work begins by recognizing that not all differences are merely moral styles. Mamdani’s campaign trafficked in ideas that crossed into antisemitism — denying Jewish self-determination, vilifying Israel as inherently criminal, and normalizing hostility toward Jewish identity itself.

A community committed to moral dialogue cannot ignore such realities; tolerance cannot mean the abdication of judgment. Yet if Jews can still hold fast to both conscience and covenant — defending themselves without surrendering compassion, seeking justice without erasing solidarity — they can model for the nation how moral diversity becomes democratic strength. Democracy, like Judaism, survives not on unanimity but on the hard, often uncomfortable work of moral conversation and that work begins with the courage to confront hatred without forfeiting humanity.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Palace of Westminster, c. 2015. Photo: Carlos Cunha/Wikimedia Commons.

Christopher Marlowe (1564 –1593, also known as Kit Marlowe) was, after William Shakespeare, the most famous playwright of the Elizabethan era.

His brilliant career was cut short when he was murdered in a controversial fight over a meal check. Experts to this day argue about the circumstances, with endless conspiracy theories abounding. Even an official coroner’s account of Marlowe’s death, discovered in 1925, did little to persuade scholars that it told the whole story.

But no one doubts his brilliance and his influence on English literature. Some even think that he wrote much of Shakespeare’s work. Marlowe wanted to challenge and shock, which in the atmosphere of Elizabethan England, was a huge risk. His plays combined controversial ideas of power and anti-clericalism and humanism with extreme physical violence, cruelty and bloodshed.

At that moment in time, England was at a crossroads. It was a divided, poor country caught between the richer and more powerful Catholic powers of Spain, France, and Portugal. It was under constant threat of invasion and was riven with religious conflicts, with different ideologies being forced on reluctant citizens by successive monarchs.

Favorites jockeyed for power and rose to the top, only to be cut down on whims, suspicions, and jealousies. England was weak economically and resorted to piracy to fill government coffers. Almost everyone was suspected of heresy or betrayal, and the punishment was a horrible death. Friends and families turned against each other. Marlowe was almost constantly under suspicion of heresy precisely because he was not afraid to shock — to challenge authority and convention. Anyone at that time who thought the sun revolved around the earth, or that it was older than a few thousand years, was regarded as dangerous.

Marlowe was born into a modest family at a time when England was a highly stratified society dominated by the aristocracy and landed gentry. Unlike Shakespeare, Marlow went to Cambridge University, which meant that he was immersed in the classics. But to survive and rise with neither class nor wealth, he had to struggle financially and find ways of being useful to the hierarchies. That’s why he got involved in various nefarious activities and unsavory people.

Of his plays, three stand out from the rest: Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, and Dr. Faustus. All are concerned with lust for power and wealth. I will ignore the crude Jew hatred poured into the character of the Jew in The Jew of Malta. Marlowe was after all a child of his times even though there were no Jews in England. It made Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice look positively benign.

Marlowe was influenced by Niccolo Machiavelli the controversial Florentine political thinker known for his pragmatic theory of power.

Some of his highlights include, “It is much safer to be feared than loved”; “Men must either be caressed or annihilated”; and “the end justifies the means.” And most relevant to us at this moment of political upheaval, uncertainty, and hypocrisy: “He who studies what ought to be done, rather than what is done, will learn the way to his downfall rather than his preservation.”

Much of this is summed up in an impressive book, Christopher Marlowe: Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival. Written by Stephen Greenblatt, it’s a delight, combining history with literature.

The story is a warning — or a sign of hope — about what can happen during political upheaval.

We have just witnessed in New York politics what can happen when the mob, blinded by insecurity and the record of failed ideology takes charge of the asylum. One can only pray that wiser counsel will prevail.

The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.