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The fuzzy, neurotic, unmistakably Jewish legacy of cartoonist Ed Koren
(JTA) — The other day I was in a kosher Chinese restaurant and I noticed an older white guy happily eating alone. He had white shaggy beard and white shaggy hair tucked under a ball cap reading “You had me at coffee.” He looked like a former City College professor who was thoroughly enjoying his retirement.
In other words, he looked like an Ed Koren cartoon.
Koren, who died last Friday at 87, published well over 1,000 cartoons in The New Yorker magazine, starting in 1962. His drawings were instantly recognizable, featuring fuzzy, lumpy, big-nosed people who looked vaguely like gentle animals, and fuzzy, lumpy, big-nosed animals that looked vaguely like amiable people.
His subject matter was also consistent: Middle-class, slightly neurotic characters whose challenges were as minor as they were familiar to the New Yorker’s target readers. In one, set in a restaurant, a well-dressed couple is interrupted at their meal by a waitress who explains, “We think it’s terribly important that you meet the people responsible for the food you are eating tonight.” Behind her is a crowd of farmers, along with a turkey and a cow.
In another, set in a playground, a little girl is eating an enormous ice cream cone. “My parents decriminalized sugar,” she tells her friends.
The New York Times, reviewing an exhibit of his work, once described him as the “poet laureate” of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The same article also described the neighborhood as “the home of overeducated, comfortable but not super rich liberals and the psychotherapists who treat their garden-variety neuroses.”
I hesitate to lay too much Jewish significance on artists or writers who didn’t make much of their own Jewish identities, but many of Koren’s characters seemed Jewish even if he didn’t say so. And Koren, born to Jewish parents in Manhattan on Dec. 15, 1935, seemed never to have said so. The few references to his Jewish background that I found came via his friends, like Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s, who once told a newspaper, “Like Ed, I’m a Jewish guy from the suburbs of New York City.” (Koren grew up in Mount Vernon, in Westchester County.)
Instead, his characters inhabited a world defined by familiar markers of a white, secular, upper middle class New York: Zabar’s tote bags, fussy restaurants, overstuffed apartments, hovering parents, pampered pets. Not explicitly Jewish, but unmistakably so, like the Upper West Side itself.
Koren attended Horace Mann School in the Bronx, and edited the Jester, the student humor magazine at Columbia College. After graduation he worked odd jobs, then got a Master of Fine Arts degree at Pratt and taught printmaking, drawing and design courses at Brown University for 13 years. When he wasn’t drawing cartoons (“I couldn’t survive as a cartoonist, frankly,” he once explained) he did illustrations for other magazines, books and advertisers, and made prints that were shown in gallery shows.
He became a full-time resident of Vermont in 1982, but even his cartoons set in the countryside often featured city dwellers adjusting — clumsily — to rural life. (A pair of hikers are stuck in a tree as a pair of furry beasts shake the trunk. The man says to the woman, “Tell them how hard we’ve worked to protect their habitat.”)
Despite the city’s changes, Koren cartoons still come alive on Amsterdam Avenue and in Riverside Park. Bearded, older dads pushing toddlers in strollers. Vaguely bohemian women walking dogs who look just like them. Precocious tots already thinking about their college essays.
“I’m a social historian in a funny way, I guess. Or, looking at it another way, an armchair anthropologist,” Koren told an interviewer in 2012. “What I find funny is the formulaic way in which people go about their lives and the absurd, silly things they do — unreflectively, unthinkingly, intensely, humorlessly. All those things intrigue me. It’s an endless well of delight and absurdity.”
All of which is to say that some people contribute to the Jews’ self-understanding without, like Koren, wearing their Jewishness on their sleeves or anywhere else. I recently covered an exhibit of Yiddish holdings from the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary. There are cartoons on display that show Jewish immigrants as they were at the turn of the 20th century – peddlers, rabbis, cobblers, garment workers. Perhaps 100 years from now certain kinds of New York Jews of the late 20th and early 21st century will be represented by an Ed Koren cartoon.
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The three profound Jewish lessons of Mamdani’s astonishing victory
Among pollsters familiar with the American Jewish vote, the events of Nov. 4, 2025 in New York City will go down as Opposite Day.
A CNN exit poll showed that Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor-elect, received just about 30% of the Jewish vote, while his opponents, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, together received a total of 70%. Those numbers are effectively the inverse of the Jewish vote in decades of national elections, which have usually seen the Democratic candidate getting between 70% and 80% of the Jewish vote.
Now, that stark divide is one that Jews, and Mamdani, will have to learn to live with.
For the majority of Jews who opposed Mamdani, there are a few primary lessons.
First and foremost: If you want people to care about your most important issues, you first have to address their most important issues.
Pro-Palestinian positions may have fueled Mamdani’s politics and established his early volunteer base, but they didn’t win him the election. The New Yorkers who voted for him “overwhelmingly” said cost of living is their top issue, reported CNN.
For most New Yorkers who hit the polls, questions about Mamdani’s attitude toward Israel Israel — and even concerns about antisemitism — paled in importance beside affordability.
Yet one tone-deaf Jewish leader after another pleaded with voters to reject Mamdani because of his highly critical attitude toward Israel. That stance, they said, could lead to attacks on Jewish New Yorkers.
Exactly why should economically besieged New Yorkers care?
Second, I suspect we will find out that a good portion of the Jewish voters who did opt for Mamdani did so not despite his stance on Israel, but because of it.
Most American Jews say Israel has committed war crimes against Palestinians. Some 68% are unhappy with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Most can’t vote against Netanyahu, but they can vote for Mamdani, or their local equivalent.
The Jewish vote for Mamdani was a rebuke to the mainstream Jewish leadership that organized against the mayor-elect. That leadership didn’t speak for these Jews. Mamdani did.
It’s also surely true that some portion of Jewish Mamdani supporters voted for him while opposing his views and statements about Israel — what my fellow Forward columnist Jay Michaelson called the “No-Yes option”. These Jewish voters saw Mamdani, in the last months of his campaign, reach out to Jewish leaders, political opponents, business interests and others as a sign that he was open to compromise and bridge-building.
And third: While many in the Jewish community had good reasons to oppose Mamdani, they should be grateful for those Jews who supported him. There is a certain blessing in the fact that center-left Jewish leaders like outgoing Comptroller Brad Lander and former New York City mayoral candidate Ruth Messinger got behind Mamdani — because under his administration they will now be in or near the room where it happens.
These leaders, who have been slammed by some as traitors, sell-outs and self-haters for supporting Mamdani, now have the opportunity to help him make good on his promise to protect and serve Jewish New Yorkers.
Mamdani built reassurance on that front into his victory speech Tuesday night.
“We will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism,” he said, before pivoting to decry the Islamophobia he faced in the campaign.
But Mamdani himself has much to learn, too.
Tomorrow, when the party is over and the 34-year-old mayor-elect begins meeting with his transition team,what lessons should he draw from the Jewish vote’s split?
Above all, that “being overly controversial on Israel is not in his self-interest,” said Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College in Pasadena, Calif. “He needs to bring people together. He needs to focus laser-like on running the city and his affordability agenda.”
It’s one thing to be critical of Netanyahu, and another to say, as Mamdani has, that he would boycott the joint research center between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion based on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. He should stick to the former.
And as he works to fulfill his promise to make New York more affordable, Mamdani must also keep his promise to Jewish New Yorkers to keep them safe.
There will be special, if unfair, scrutiny of how this Muslim mayor relates to his Jewish citizens, and Mamdani could prove the fearmongers to be, well, fearmongering.
He must show he can rein things in, said Dreier, who served as deputy mayor of Boston in the 1980s under Ray Flynn. Flynn was feared by the business elite but left office with a 74% approval rating. “We ran a very progressive campaign,” Dreier said, “and then we had to figure out what we were going to give in, and where we could hold the line.”
And it’s not just New Yorkers and New York Jews who will be watching. Mamdani’s religion and views on Israel have made it inevitable that American Jews across the country will be either on board, or on edge.
Will Mamdani work to flip the Jewish voter exit poll numbers for his next race back to the familiar 70/30? That would seem to be the move for a young politician with a promising career ahead of him, and with a Jewish constituency that is predisposed to vote for the Democrat.
But say he leans into his radical roots and betrays his promises? That would leave a lot of Jews feeling politically homeless — at a time when the Republicans are opening the doors to explicitly antisemitic far-right figures like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. The question of whether Jews still fit, politically, in the United States — and if so, where — is one that Mamdani will have a crucial role in answering.
“My rabbi has been on the job for three months and just gave a sermon about Mamdani,” Dreier said. “I mean, why the hell would a rabbi here in Pasadena care about who’s the mayor of New York?”
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Mamdani’s victory divides Jews one more way: Whether to say congratulations
Jewish leaders reacted with a mix of chill, optimism and resolve after state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, an outspoken critic of Israel, coasted to victory in New York City’s mayoral election.
Many of Mamdani’s biggest critics commented on his victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But not all of them were willing to congratulate Mamdani, whose politics have exposed a deep rift in the Jewish community over Israel and antisemitism.
Mamdani’s refusal to disavow the phrase “globalize the intifada,” his description of Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide and his admission that he would not attend the city’s annual Israel Day parade infuriated many of the city’s Jews, though others — especially younger Jewish voters — understood or appreciated what they saw as a principled stand.
Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, often emphasized that foreign policy was a secondary concern, but he was dogged throughout the campaign by remarks he made about Israel.
Exit polls by CNN showed 60% of the city’s Jewish voters backing Cuomo, who ran as an independent following Mamdani’s victory in the June Democratic primary.
Among the detractors declining to wish the mayor-elect well was Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who wrote on X that in light of Mamdani’s “long, disturbing record on issues of deep concern to the Jewish community, we will approach the next four years with resolve.”
A joint statement from several establishment New York Jewish institutions, including the city’s Jewish Federation and Board of Rabbis, also declined to congratulate Mamdani, who is the city’s first-ever Muslim mayor-elect.
“New Yorkers have spoken, electing Zohran Mamdani as the next Mayor of New York City,” the statement, which was also signed by the American Jewish Committee, Jewish Community Relations Council and ADL, in part read. “We recognize that voters are animated by a range of issues, but we cannot ignore that the Mayor-elect holds core beliefs fundamentally at odds with our community’s deepest convictions and most cherished values.”
The groups added that they would work with “all levels of government” to ensure the safety of the city’s Jewish community.
Other Mamdani opponents took a friendlier tack.
Pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman, who had predicted a Cuomo win earlier in the day, appeared to extend an olive branch. After the election was called for Mamdani, Ackman wrote, “@zohranmamdani congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.”
The Democratic Majority for Israel, a national organization, congratulated Mamdani but added, “We urge him to prioritize fulfilling his campaign promises to bring down costs, not foreign policy issues that are unrelated to the everyday lives of most New Yorkers.”
One pattern emerging from the reaction, particularly among Cuomo supporters, was to blame Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa as a spoiler who stayed in the race after even incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropped out. Cuomo supporters at his Ziegfeld Ballroom watch party chanted, “Shame on Sliwa.” But Sliwa’s votes, even if Cuomo had received all of them, would likely not have been enough to overcome Mamdani’s lead.
New York City controller Brad Lander, who campaigned for Mamdani and helped build bridges to parts of the Jewish community, celebrated at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre with the mayor-elect wearing a message to Cuomo on his T-shirt, “Good F—ing Riddance.”
The post Mamdani’s victory divides Jews one more way: Whether to say congratulations appeared first on The Forward.
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In a first, a ballot initiative to divest from Israel has won at the ballot box in Boston suburb
(JTA) — A municipal ballot proposal to divest from Israel went before a popular vote for the first time on Tuesday — and pulled off a decisive victory.
Question 3 won more than 55% of the vote in unofficial election results in the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts, as the Israel-divestment movement saw the elevation of its most well-known proponent in politics — Zohran Mamdani — to mayor of New York City.
Local pro-Palestinian activists claimed victory, with Somerville for Palestine — the group that gathered the signatures required to put the non-binding resolution on the ballot — posting a celebratory Instagram video alongside the Boston chapter of anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace.
However, as they were celebrating, the mayoral candidate best poised to enact the proposal in Somerville conceded his race to a rival who signaled he was far less likely to do so. Willie Burnley Jr., a democratic socialist who had endorsed Question 3, lost to fellow at-large city council member Jake Wilson, who did not.
A handful of other American cities have previously adopted Israel divestment proposals brought by their city councils. One of those is Portland, Maine, whose mayor publicly regretted backing divestment after hearing from local Jewish groups. An attempt last year to place a similar referendum on a Pittsburgh ballot failed after legal challenges to the signatures. Similar attempts to challenge the Somerville measure failed.
Home to Tufts University and several Jewish congregations, the four-square-mile Somerville has a population of around 82,000. Residents voted on whether its mayor should “engage in business that sustains Israel’s apartheid, genocide and illegal occupation of Palestine.” The local teachers union endorsed the measure.
Jewish groups opposed the measure, including the newly formed group Somerville United Against Discrimination, which ran TV ads against it. Brian Sokol, a Jewish IT manager and writer based in Somerville, implored his neighbors on Facebook to reject the measure — citing friends of his who were killed by a Hamas suicide bomber in Israel in 1996.
“I am not equating those in Somerville urging a Yes vote with violent extremists or terrorists,” he wrote. “But passing this ballot measure would unintentionally land Somerville on the wrong side of the deeper ideological rift.”
On the other side, a group of 84 local pro-Palestinian Jews endorsed the measure in an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper. Celebrating the recent ceasefire in Israel and Gaza but saying that Israel has continued to commit atrocities in the region, the authors pointed to local contracts with two companies, Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed Martin, that total over $2 million.
Somerville became a flashpoint in the fight over campus pro-Palestinian activism earlier this year when a Tufts graduate student, Rümeysa Öztürk, was seized by ICE agents and put into deportation proceedings for writing an op-ed in the student paper urging divestment from Israel. A judge freed Öztürk while her deportation case remains ongoing.
The post In a first, a ballot initiative to divest from Israel has won at the ballot box in Boston suburb appeared first on The Forward.