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NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa has a mixed record with Jews. Catch up on it here.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of New York City, is best known for founding the Guardian Angels — and he credits a Jewish group with inspiring the movement.
As a teenager going to high school in Crown Heights, a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, Sliwa says that he saw a group of men chasing out antisemitic gangs. That group was the Maccabees, founded by Rabbi Samuel Schrage to patrol the streets for crime in the 1960s.
“People leaving shul, running down Kingston towards Empire Boulevard, and these gangbangers were running for their lives,” Sliwa recalled in a 2021 interview with journalist Yitzi Weiner. “I said: ‘Wow, this really works! These guys are not coming back in here messing with the Lubavitchers!’”
That image remained with him until he started the Guardian Angels, a citizen patrol group on New York City subways and streets whose members wear a red beret, in 1979. It would become one of many stories about Jews in Sliwa’s public life, during which he has alternately talked about Jewish communities with admiration and disdain.
The radio host, amateur subway patroller and local celebrity is raising two Jewish sons, wearing his red beret as a kippah at their bar mitzvahs. (He and their mother, Melinda Katz, separated in 2014.) But he has also faced his share of controversies with Jewish communities, including accusations of antisemitism.
Sliwa is highly unlikely to become mayor of the overwhelmingly Democratic city. Since incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropped out, he is now the lowest-polling candidate, trailing frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by a wide margin. Still, Sliwa has cast himself as a champion for Republicans in the outer boroughs and a sizable minority of disaffected, politically homeless New Yorkers — including Jews who don’t like their other options.
We are breaking down for you what Sliwa has actually said about Jews, antisemitism, Israel and the Gaza war.
Jewish security and antisemitism
Long before Sliwa’s foray into politics, he worked alongside Jewish patrols such as Shmira and Shomrim, whose unarmed volunteers respond to emergencies in Jewish neighborhoods and assist police. He talks proudly about the Guardian Angels’ efforts to defend Chabad-Lubavitch Jews during the anti-Jewish Crown Heights riots of 1991.
While Sliwa says he would bulk up the NYPD’s personnel as mayor, volunteer groups like these are central to his vision for security — especially in Jewish communities.
“I, unlike any of the candidates, have said Jews must protect themselves,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If you depend strictly on Gentiles, history is replete with instances where you’re going to be horribly disappointed.” In another recent interview with the Queens Jewish Link, Sliwa said to Jews that he would not be “your Gentile mashiach,” using the Hebrew word for messiah.
The patrols that Sliwa views as key to public safety have been subjects of controversy over the years. In 2008, a 20-year-old Black man was beaten by a pair of Shmira patrollers. Another young Black man, Taj Patterson, was brutally attacked by a group of haredi Orthodox men that included members of Shomrim in 2013.
The Guardian Angels, meanwhile, have been criticized for fabricating stunts. In a 1992 interview, Sliwa admitted to manufacturing crimes and injuries for the group’s publicity.
New York City mayoral candidates Scott Stringer, Curtis Sliwa and Brad Lander attend a memorial event for seniors who died during the Covid pandemic in nursing homes, March 23, 2025, in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of the borough of Brooklyn. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
Sliwa told JTA that he wants to introduce students to understanding antisemitism at a young age. As a child himself, he described a fork in the road when he lost an academic award to a Jewish classmate. His uncle suggested the classmate had a deal with their Jewish teacher, but Sliwa’s father corrected him, saying, “‘Curtis, he studied a lot harder than you. Lesson? Study harder.’” Sliwa said this kind of correction should be formally implemented in schools.
“There is no curriculum that addresses the problem of antisemitism,” he said. “Me? I would do it in third and fourth grade.”
Israel and the Gaza war
Israel and its ongoing war in Gaza have loomed large over the mayoral race. Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian advocacy and staunch criticism of Israel shook up New York City politics — and in response, his opponents have proffered the support for Israel that has long been tradition across both parties.
Sliwa talks about his visits to Israel as a thread that connects him to Jewish New Yorkers. During a trip there in 1998, he was offered free rides from bus drivers who mistook him for an Israeli paratrooper with his red beret, he told the Jewish News Syndicate. He applies his theory of Jewish-led security for Jews to Israel, telling The Jewish Press, “Jews have to organize among themselves. That’s why the State of Israel came about.”
He has criticized Mamdani’s views, saying the frontrunner has “no love in his heart for the State of Israel and for Israelis.” Like other candidates, he has rebuked Mamdani for declining to condemn the pro-Palestinian slogan “globalize the intifada” during the primary. (Mamdani has since clarified he does not personally use the language and would “discourage” it because of interpretations that it could incite violence against Jews.)
Sliwa went a step further by extending his attacks to Mamdani’s Jewish supporters. “I would say the Jewish community must look internally,” he said to JNS. “Why are some of our children and grandchildren following this guy and giving him absolution and exemption when he is using the language of an antisemite?”
But Sliwa has also said that he is more focused on his “law and order” platform than foreign policy. In an interview with The Forward, he pointed out that Cuomo’s focus on antisemitism accusations against Mamdani failed during the Democratic primary, which Mamdani roundly won.
And he recently acknowledged the intensity of pro-Palestinian sentiment in New York City, citing a New York Times/Siena poll that found voters are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel. In an interview with City & State, he suggested that President Donald Trump could dampen Mamdani’s momentum by brokering peace in the Middle East.
“If he can bring peace to Gaza, he can definitely take one political plank away from Zohran Mamdani, who has used that effectively during the primary and will now use it in the general campaign,” said Sliwa.
Controversies
Sliwa has clashed with Jewish New Yorkers over the years. In a 2018 speech, he described Orthodox Jews as a drag on the tax system and warned suburban residents that they were trying to “take over your community.”
Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder and now a New York mayoral candidate, responds in a video to accusations that remarks he made in 2018 were antisemitic, July 25, 2021. (Screenshot)
“We’re not talking about poor, impoverished, disabled people who need help. We’re talking about able-bodied men who study Torah and Talmud all day and we subsidize them,” he said in a videotaped meeting in the Hudson Valley. “All they do is make babies like there’s no tomorrow and who’s subsidizing that? We are.”
This speech resurfaced when Sliwa ran for mayor in 2021. He responded with a video in which he did not apologize or disavow his comments, but offered to meet with Orthodox leaders to “resolve our differences.”
“My two youngest sons have been raised Jewish. They need to read this? To say to themselves, my father is an antisemite? Come on, even my worst critics out there would recognize that’s a shanda,” he said in the video.
Despite his offense at being called an “antisemite,” Sliwa sparked backlash again at a 2024 event by saying that antisemitism was innate to “Gentiles.”
“It’s in our DNA,” he said at an event supporting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Staten Island. “I also have to hold myself back sometimes. And I have two Jewish children.” He later told JTA that he “used the wrong term” in those remarks, meaning to say that antisemitism was often “fed into the minds” of non-Jews.
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The post NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa has a mixed record with Jews. Catch up on it here. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.
Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.
Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”
“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”
“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.
He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”
Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.
“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”
“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”
Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.
After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.
What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.
Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.
“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.
“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”
“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”
Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.
But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”
That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”
That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”
As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.
Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.
To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”
At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.
“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.
“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”
Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”
Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”
During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.
“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
The post As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich appeared first on The Forward.
