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Meet the 83-year-old Jewish activist who stars in Zohran Mamdani’s campaign ads
(JTA) — When Zohran Mamdani’s first TV ad of the general election went live last week, the first person viewers saw was an 83-year-old Jewish woman from the Upper West Side.
Rosalind Petchesky, a retired political scientist and progressive activist, has become a recurring star of Mamdani’s social media video campaign, which is widely seen as crucial to vaulting him from a local politician in Queens to the frontrunner for mayor.
“I used to love New York,” Petchesky says at the beginning of the 30-second spot. “But now, it’s just where I live.”
The ad then shifts to a hopeful tone centered around Mamdani’s message of affordability, with the title, “Things Can Change.”
The real-life Petchesky says the sentiment didn’t actually resonate with her. “I kept thinking, ‘I wouldn’t say I used to love New York. I still love New York! I never didn’t love New York,’” she said, laughing, in an interview.
But she said she was not bothered that a second, more hopeful line she’d initially spoken — “But now, I feel like everything’s starting to change” — had ended up on the cutting-room floor.
“I think they must have decided the positive part was going to be done by Zohran, so they didn’t need that,” Petchesky said. “To me, it’s just another way of helping the campaign. And they want me to do something? I do it.”
How did Petchesky come to be a loyal volunteer for Mamdani, a half-century her junior? As with many of Mamdani’s earliest Jewish supporters, the answer lies in opposition to Israel.
Petchesky is a longtime critic of the country, since she first visited as a teenager in 1959. Active for the last decade in Jewish Voice for Peace, the anti-Zionist organization, she first met Mamdani in May 2023 when she and other JVP members travelled to the state legislature in Albany to lobby for his Not On Our Dime Act. The legislation, which failed to advance, proposed blocking New York nonprofits from supporting Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Petchesky has been involved with JVP since retiring from teaching at Hunter College in 2013. During her scholarly career, Petchesky earned a MacArthur Fellowship (known as the “genius award”) in 1995, and became recognized as a “leading theorist on international reproductive rights.” A feminist activist and thinker, Petchesky’s work has dovetailed with the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 2021 she co-edited the book, “A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism.”
After meeting Mamdani in Albany, Petchesky said the pair had “a number of encounters that were fascinating and fun” in the following months.
Mamdani posted a photo of the two linking arms at a demonstration on Oct. 13, 2023, less than a week after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, calling on Sen. Chuck Schumer to support a ceasefire. The pair were among the 60 New Yorkers arrested that night for blocking traffic outside Schumer’s home.
“Rosalind Petchesky is an 81-year old Jewish New Yorker who deeply inspires me,” Mamdani wrote in his post about that night.
“As we sat handcuffed on the bus to the police precinct, Ros told me that she’d been away from home for two weeks and had only gotten back that day,” he wrote. “She was supposed to be at home that night eating dinner with her partner, but she decided she couldn’t be at home when we were on the brink of genocide.”
A few months later, Mamdani and Petchesky appeared on the “Laura Flander & Friends” podcast together, along with JVP member Jay Saper. The episode, titled “Organizing for Ceasefire Through Policy & Protest: Meet the People of JVP & NY Assemblymember Mamdani,” focused on JVP’s and Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian activism and their efforts with the Not On Our Dime Act.
Petchesky spoke about the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, including through a feminist lens, saying she sees “Israeli persecution of Palestinians as a form of reproductive injustice and attack on families.” She also spoke about Canadian-Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed on Oct. 7, 2023 when Hamas attacked and killed over 100 people at her home community, Kibbutz Be’eri.
“Vivian Silver was amazing,” Petchesky said. “She actually helped ferry Palestinian children from Gaza to hospitals in Israel. She worked with Gazans. … It’s horrible that she was killed and we don’t know for sure whose bombs killed her.”
By the time Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign in October 2024, the two had formed a “deep bond of trust,” Petchesky said — enough so that he asked her to be in his announcement video.
“I’ll make buses fast and free,” Mamdani says in the video. “So I can just get where I’m going,” Petchesky says defiantly.
“He called me up at home and said, ‘We’re gonna send a car for you. We want you to come to Astoria and be in this video,’” Petchesky recalled.
She added, “He wanted an old lady to talk about buses. And I’m the person he first thought of, because he knew me.”
Petchesky said she’s most excited to see Mamdani bring together Black, Asian, Latinx and Jewish activists to “stand up to Trump and ICE”; to make a rent freeze happen; and to instate free buses for all New Yorkers — the democratic socialist candidate’s most prominent pledges. But it’s clear that her vision around Israel also overlaps with Mamdani’s — and while some critics say Mamdani’s stances on Israel amount to antisemitism, Petchesky countered that those accusations discount the segment of Jews who share Mamdani’s views.
“There’s a big split in what’s called the Jewish community — there’s no single Jewish community,” she said. “There’s many.”
Petchesky’s own Jewish story involved a decades-long breach — and a return through her involvement with JVP.
During the podcast with Mamdani, Petchesky spoke about her experience growing up in an observant Jewish family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before recoiling from Judaism after witnessing racism during a 1959 trip to Israel.
She expanded on that experience in a recent interview. She said she sang in the temple choir with her mother but became disaffected after returning from Israel and sharing what she’d witnessed. A local rabbi dismissed her concerns, she said.
“I was very angry, and when I went to college I said, ‘I’m done, I’m not going to synagogue anymore, these people are hypocrites, I have nothing to do with it,’” said Petchesky, who was involved in civil rights advocacy at the time. “I was young, you know, I was just angry.”
After decades of being disconnected from Judaism, Petchesky said she accompanied a grieving friend to a service at B’nai Jeshurun, a non-denominational synagogue on the Upper West Side. Petchesky said she began attending more regularly; she was a fan of the rabbi, and felt particularly moved by the music.
But she stopped attending when she felt the rabbi at the time did not take a strong stance against the Iraq War. After a few years of unsuccessfully trying other places (“They were all, what I would say is too Zionist, they were supporting Israel”), she was introduced to JVP in 2013.
“I felt, after all those years and decades, I had found my political home,” said Petchesky, who attends services at Kolot Chayeinu, the progressive synagogue where Mamdani and City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is a member, attended a Rosh Hashanah service. (Lander has joked that Kolot Chayeinu is a place where JVP Jews and J Street Jews come together, with “minimal side-eye.”)
About a decade after finding her political home with JVP, Petchesky’s path became intertwined with Mamdani’s. And when JVP’s political branch organized a celebratory “Jews for Zohran” event this August, following his primary victory, Mamdani gave Petchesky a shoutout while speaking to the crowd of more than 150.
“It is lovely to see so many of you,” Mamdani said before singling out Petchesky. “It is lovely to see the star of our launch video, who is right here, who ‘just wants to get where she’s going.’”
Petchesky was just one of Mamdani’s many Jewish allies at the event, but her shoutout drew a big applause.
“I don’t know, I mean we kind of bonded,” Petchesky said of her and Mamdani. “I think he’s just fond of me — you know, little old Jewish lady who gets arrested.”
Unlike with her comment in the new ad, Petchesky said her role in the campaign announcement video has resonated with her more as time has passed.
“At the time I thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’” she said. “And between that video and now, I’m realizing that will really help me. I mean I stood and waited 15 minutes the other day for the bus. I finally did sit down, but it was very hard.”
She added, “I almost did yell out on the bus, ‘People! Vote for Zohran because we’ll have free fast buses!”
The post Meet the 83-year-old Jewish activist who stars in Zohran Mamdani’s campaign ads appeared first on The Forward.
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Hochul makes play for Orthodox voters with tuition relief and synagogue buffer zones
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is making an early play for Jewish voters ahead in her reelection bid, coupling a major initiative to help families pay for yeshivas with tough-on-antisemitism legislation.
The moves aid Orthodox Jewish voting blocs — before her Republican challenger, Bruce Blakeman, gains traction.
A recent Siena University poll of 804 voters found Hochul leading Blakeman statewide by 16 points, 49% to 33%. But among the smaller sample of 65 Jewish voters, the race was far tighter, with Hochul leading just 46% to 41%.
Central to Hochul’s outreach was her announcement last week, during a private meeting with Orthodox leaders, that New York will opt into President Donald Trump’s new federal school-choice tax credit program. Known as the Education Freedom Tax Credit, it allows taxpayers to receive up to a $1,700 federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, which can then fund tuition assistance and other educational expenses.
A spokesperson for the governor confirmed that Hochul is supportive of the program as part of a broader commitment to helping families afford nonpublic education. Emma Wallner, the spokesperson, added that the administration is reviewing the federal program to ensure there are no “poison pills that could harm New York’s education system.”
For Orthodox voters, tuition relief has long ranked alongside Israel and antisemitism as a political priority. In 2014, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo made a last-minute effort to court the community by pledging to expand a state tuition assistance program to cover yeshivas as “a matter of justice.” Cuomo ultimately won 70% of the vote in Borough Park, one of the largest Orthodox strongholds. That proposal later failed in the state legislature.
Hochul and her allies remain mindful of the results of the 2022 governor’s race, when former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within five percentage points of defeating her. Zeldin, who is Jewish, was powered by strong Orthodox support.
That memory looms large as Hochul prepares for a likely matchup against Bruce Blakeman, the first Jewish executive of Nassau County, who has positioned himself as a tough-on-crime conservative focused on antisemitism and support for Israel.
Blakeman has so far struggled to gain broader traction statewide and has yet to build deep relationships within the Orthodox political infrastructure in Brooklyn and Rockland County. Orthodox voting blocs, a traditionally Republican-leaning constituency, have repeatedly backed incumbents and even Democrats when communal priorities align.
A spokesperson for the Blakeman campaign did not immediately respond to questions from the Forward about whether the Republican candidate supports the tuition-relief initiative or plans to offer a proposal of his own.
Addressing rising antisemitism
Blakeman, who met with Trump at the White House last week to discuss his candidacy, could further face a challenge presenting himself as a stronger protector of the estimated 1.8 million Jews across the state amid rising antisemitism.
Hochul, who endorsed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year after remaining neutral during the Democratic primary, has been seen by some in the Jewish community as a counterweight within the Democratic Party to the mayor, whose handling of antisemitism and criticism of Israel has left many Jewish voters uneasy.
The Democratic incumbent has publicly opposed several key Mamdani priorities, like universal free buses and a millionaire tax, and has also distanced herself from Mamdani on Israel and pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
Hochul is moving fast on that front, too.
Last week, she announced a tentative budget deal that includes a measure to create a 25-foot buffer zone to protect houses of worship statewide from protest. “We’ve seen demonstrations targeting faith communities outside synagogues, mosques and churches,” Hochul told reporters. This is not free expression, this is harassment, and it has no place in the state of New York.” The measure would go further than a more limited enactment passed by the New York City Council requiring safety plans for protests near houses of worship, which Mamdani allowed to become law without his signature.
Hochul has also proposed an additional $35 million in security funding for vulnerable institutions, bringing total state spending on such protection to $131 million since she took office.
The legislation remains unresolved in Albany. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters Thursday there was “no deal” yet on the broader state budget package. Some Jewish lawmakers have also criticized the proposed 25-foot buffer zone as too narrow, arguing it should be expanded to at least 100 feet, similar to protections already in place around polling sites.
Blakeman told the Forward last week that he would push to expand the buffer zone if elected governor. “I think 25 feet is too close,” he said.
David Greenfield, a former New York City Council member who introduced Hochul to Orthodox leaders when she became the lieutenant governor candidate in 2014 and boosted her in 2022, said that Hochul is “cementing her status as the best friend the Jewish community has had in Albany in decades” by pushing this agenda. “At a moment when Jewish New Yorkers are looking for leaders who will actually show up for them, Hochul keeps showing up,” said Greenfield, now head of the Met Council charity organization.
Blakeman’s play
Blakeman has also made fighting antisemitism a central theme of his campaign. On Sunday, Blakeman addressed a rally held by Zionist groups in Queens, after swastikas were found spray-painted on synagogues and homes in Forest Hills and Rego Park. “We have to make sure that every antisemite knows that we will not back down, that we will stand up to it,” he said in his remarks. Speaking to the New York Post, Blakeman also called Mamdani “un-American” and “antisemitic.”
Last week, Blakeman held a press conference in Brighton Beach, a Brooklyn neighborhood with a significant Russian-speaking Jewish population, calling for the cancellation of a planned concert by Yulduz Usmonova, an Uzbek singer accused of making antisemitic statements. “Never again will we tolerate antisemitism or attacks on the Jewish people anywhere in the world, and especially here in Brooklyn, with this huge Jewish community of which my wife Segal was a member of,” Blakeman said.
The battle for the Jewish vote traditionally unfolds later in the season, closer to the High Holidays season, when voters pay more attention to the election. But Hochu’s recent moves signal she is not waiting until the fall to lock up support from a swing and reliable voting bloc.
The post Hochul makes play for Orthodox voters with tuition relief and synagogue buffer zones appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Antisemitism Crisis in America’: Swastika Graffiti Again Appears Across New York City Boro
Swastikas graffitied in Forest Park in Queens, New York City over the weekend. Photo: Screenshot.
Antisemitic vandals in Queens, New York City are painting the town Nazi red, having added over the weekend two new incidents of swastika graffiti to a spree of hate crimes targeting Jewish institutions and homes across the borough.
As seen in photographs shared on social media, the unknown suspects graffitied some eleven swastikas at Highland Park and Forest Park for locals to discover on Monday — just one week after perpetrating the same crime at four Jewish owned properties in Rego Park and Forest Hills.
“This is yet another hateful incident meant to intimidate Jewish New Yorkers and divide our city,” New York City Council speaker of the house Julie Menin said in a statement posted on the X social media platform. “We want to be clear: we cannot and will not accept this as normal.”
The vandalism wave came just as the New York City Police Department (NYPD) announced that an ongoing surge in antisemitic hate crimes in the metropolis, which is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, continues unabated.
According to newly released data the agency published on Monday, Jews were targeted in 60 percent of all confirmed hate crimes last month, despite making up just 10 percent of the city’s population.
In April, the police confirmed 30 antisemitic incidents out of 50 total hate crimes in the city. As for all reported/suspected hate crimes, 38 out of the total of 65 targeted Jews.
The NYPD had previously reported suspected, but unconfirmed, hate crime incidents. In February, the police began reporting confirmed incidents instead. And then after receiving scrutiny, the department began reporting both suspected and confirmed hate crimes in March.
Regardless of the methodology, the majority of all hate crimes in New York City this year have targeted Jews, especially the Orthodox community, continuing a surge in antisemitism that has swept the city after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in October 2023.
In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, for example, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In November, just days after the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
The change in New York City’s climate since Mamdani’s election is palpable, Jewish advocacy groups have said. On his first day in office in January, Mamdani voided the city government’s adoption of the IHRA definition, lifted the ban on contracts with companies boycotting Israel, and modified key provisions of an executive order directing law enforcement to monitor anti-Israel protests held near synagogues.
“Mayor Mamdani pledged to build an inclusive New York and combat all forms of hate, including antisemitism,” a coalition of leading Jewish groups said in a statement addressing the changes enacted by the new administration. “But when the new administration hit reset on many of Mayor Adams’ executive orders, it reversed … significant protections against antisemitism.”
Mayor Mamdani has denounced the swastika graffiti as a “deliberate act of antisemitic hatred” and said that he has assigned the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force to investigate it.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Middlebury College Hillel votes to rebrand, distancing from parent on Israel
The student leaders of the campus Hillel at a small liberal arts school in Vermont have voted to rename the student group, moving to distance it from an international organization they say is too pro-Israel.
Middlebury College’s Hillel student board made the decision last week after a yearlong consultation process with active participants in the campus organization, university administrators and Hillel International leadership, according to the student group’s co-presidents. The board also voted to disaffiliate from Hillel International, but were told by Middlebury’s administration that they lacked the authority to take that action, the co-presidents told the Middlebury campus newspaper.
The student group, renamed to Jewish Association of Middlebury, will continue to perform similar functions as Hillels do on hundreds of campuses around the world — holding events around Shabbat and Jewish holidays and other Jewish religious and social programming. The board says it will maintain an on-paper link with Hillel without adhering to its guidelines.
“While Middlebury College will continue to be affiliated with Hillel International, we believe this name better reflects our local community,” the board wrote last week in an email to students, according to the Campus, the school newspaper. This decision was made to reflect the desires of our diverse student body, and it doesn’t endorse any one political persuasion.”
Hillel International did not respond to a request for comment.
Hillel has said it is “steadfastly committed” to supporting Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and it prohibits association with student organizations that endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
The renaming at Middlebury comes amid a nationwide campaign against Hillel on college campuses, premised on the organization’s involvement in Israel, including sending students there to volunteer.
Hillel buildings have been occasional targets for pro-Palestinian protests since Oct. 7. More recently, anti-Zionist student groups have pushed to defund campus Hillels or disaffiliate them from the century-old Jewish organization.
The student senate of the New School in New York recently voted to defund its campus Hillel and call on the school to stop partnering with the organization — a vote the college administration rejected, saying that it did not have the authority to act. A group of Jewish students and faculty at New York University has also called to boycott Hillel.
But Middlebury College is believed to be the first school where the push to untether from the international movement were leaders of the campus Hillel itself.
Hillel/JAM co-president Caroline Jaffe told the Campus that conversations around disaffiliating from Hillel dated back to Nov. 2023, when Middlebury Hillel sold challah to raise money for World Central Kitchen, a humanitarian aid group that was delivering food to Palestinians in Gaza.
“We got a stern email from Hillel International, saying, ‘Why are you guys raising money for Gaza?’” Jaffe told the Campus. “I think that was the first time I remember [thinking], oh wow, this really isn’t aligned with my Jewish values at all, to be like, ‘Why are you guys feeding these starving people?’”
In response to Hillel’s concerns, the student group edited the Instagram post about the event to say it was a fundraiser for WCK’s team in “Israel and” Gaza.
The Forward has reached out to Jaffe for comment.
After that incident, the student-led board of Middlebury Hillel began soliciting feedback about possible disaffiliation in online forums, in person and through anonymous forms. The response, Jaffe said, was broadly supportive of disaffiliation, leading the board to schedule a vote on the matter.
Rabbi Danielle Stillman, the campus chaplain and the Hillel’s rabbi, told the Campus that the students had received support from college administrators, who helped them “think through the different perspectives of various stakeholders in the community who might be impacted by a name change.” (Stillman, who is not employed by Hillel International, did not respond to an inquiry.)
A week before the Nov. 2025 vote, however, the college administration informed Jaffe that the board did not have the power to rename the group or disaffiliate from Hillel. The board voted anyway, resulting in a 7-1 recommendation to disaffiliate.
“Let us be clear: this decision is not a rebuke of Zionism, Zionist students, or the importance of Israel to many in the Jewish community,” a Dec. 2025 email to JAM membership read. “Rather, it reflects a desire to create the most welcoming and pluralistic space possible.”
At the university’s behest, the students then met virtually with Hillel International, whose representative reiterated that the board members must universally adopt Hillel International’s political views and values about Israel, according to the Campus. But the representative also conceded that it couldn’t stop the students from changing the organization’s name.
“We said we want to disaffiliate, and they said you can’t. And we said, well, we’re going to change the name anyway. And they said, we can’t stop you,” Jaffe said.
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