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The JTA Q&A with Zohran Mamdani: ‘I don’t begrudge folks who are skeptical of me’

With days before the election in which he is favored to become New York City’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani tells Jewish New Yorkers that he understands why some might be skeptical of him — and that he would work as mayor to protect and celebrate them nonetheless.

“I don’t begrudge folks who are skeptical of me, especially with tens of millions of dollars having been spent against me with the intent to do just that, but I hope to prove that I am someone to build a relationship with, not one to fear,” Mamdani tells the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Related: What Zohran Mamdani has actually said about Jews, Israel and antisemitism

The comment was included in Mamdani’s written responses to questions submitted by JTA and the New York Jewish Week to his campaign this week. The full Q&A, covering Mamdani’s relationships with Jewish New Yorkers, his policies and principles as a vocal pro-Palestinian advocate, his favorite Hanukkah movie and more, is below.

JTA’s Andrew Cuomo Q&A | JTA’s Curtis Sliwa Q&A

You have consistently assured Jewish New Yorkers that you will make sure their synagogues are safe on the High Holidays. What is your vision for synagogue security when it is not a major holiday, and would your vision for the Department of Community Safety play a role?

The first step is acknowledging the terrifying rise in antisemitism in our city. As hate crimes overall decreased from 2023 to 2024, antisemitic ones increased. There were 345 antisemitic hate crimes last year, making up more than half of all hate crimes recorded. Many Jewish New Yorkers no longer feel safe to be who they are in this city. Our relationship with houses of worship must be one of collaboration and partnership, and the process for getting NYPD presence should be one that is simple, not one that requires faith leaders to have the mayor on speed dial. I’ve proposed a public safety plan that keeps Jewish New Yorkers safe: Our Department of Community Safety (DCS) will increase funding to combat and prevent hate crimes by 800% with an emphasis on preventing antisemitic hate crimes. My administration will protect Jewish New Yorkers on the street, on the subway, and in their synagogues.

The head of a liberal pro-Israel group at Bowdoin said that you declined to meet with him as SJP’s president because of your group’s policy of “anti-normalization.” How do you view this philosophy today, and how would it inform your interactions with Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders who support Israel and reject your condemnations of Israel, including claims that it committed genocide?

I’ve been honored to meet with countless Jewish leaders and organizations, including many who have different views on Israel and Zionism than my own. I am looking to be a mayor for all New Yorkers and look forward to meeting with anyone who cares about making the most expensive city in America affordable to all who call it home.

You’ve mentioned several times gaining a new awareness of Jewish New Yorkers’ fears about the phrase “globalize the intifada” after speaking with a rabbi. What else have you learned in your conversations with Jewish leaders? What has been most surprising to you? How have your views or plans changed as a result?

While there are countless New Yorkers who have strong feelings on what happens in Israel and Palestine — myself included — I’ve learned that our areas of agreement far outweigh where we disagree. We all have a shared commitment to not only combating antisemitism and hatred in all its forms, but also to celebrating our communities, to making our city more affordable, and to a vision of a world where every human being is created equal.

We have spoken to a number of Jewish leaders who say they have met with you but will not share the content of their conversation. Why do you think it benefits New Yorkers for their contents to remain off the record?

It’s been beautiful to see the depth and the breadth of the Jewish community in our city. We’ve had honest dialogue—which has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to introduce myself as I actually am, because many New Yorkers have only known me as a caricature. And I know that some feel that it can be easier to have productive conversations when both sides can be candid in the knowledge that what is said will remain in that room.

You’ve said you intend not to reinvest city funds in Israel bonds, in keeping with Brad Lander’s decision as comptroller. Would you advocate for divesting the city’s pension funds from Israeli securities entirely, as they did from Russian securities in 2022? Are there other ways that you would seek to advance the cause of BDS as mayor?

My priority as mayor will be to deliver on the affordability agenda I ran on: freezing the rent, universal childcare, and fast and free buses. That will always be the core of my administration. I support the approach of the current comptroller, Brad Lander, to end the practice of purchasing Israel bonds in our pension funds, which we do not do for any other nation.

Are there ways you would seek to boycott or sanction local Jewish not-for-profits for supporting Israel and Israelis that support the settlement movement, as you did with your Not On Our Dime bill? In your view, should such efforts apply to Jerusalem as well as the West Bank? Should they extend to organizations that supply humanitarian support to Israelis in the relevant areas?

Charities and nonprofits that receive a taxpayer subsidy should not support the violation of international law, and that’s what the right-wing Israeli settlement project is doing—an effort that goes against the stated foreign policy of our own government, going back several decades.

A handful of your Jewish mentors and friends have emerged through reporting about your history, and all of them openly share your views about Israel and Palestine. Can you tell us about any longstanding relationship you may have with a Jewish New Yorker who differs in that respect?

Of course — many. I moved to this city when I was 7 years old, and one of the joys of growing up in this city was learning about Jewish religion, identity, and culture through so many of my friends and their families — all of whom had a wide variety of politics on Israel and Palestine. Yet it was not the politics that I recall as much as the invitations to be a part of so many special moments — whether being invited over for Hanukkah to a friend’s home, watching “Eight Crazy Nights” as a kid, and going to b’nai mitzvot throughout my young years. I always understood these examples as part of what it means to be a New Yorker and part of what it means to love this city. Growing up on 118th and Riverside, there were so many times where I would be interacting with Jewish culture not even realizing that I was — I just thought it was the city around me.

Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama administration official and DNC chair, told the New Yorker that you were “a prototype for a new generation of American politicians, forged in the Palestinian-rights movement.” What does that mean to you? What do you hope it means for the Democratic Party’s future position on Israel?

My politics, at its core, is fundamentally one of both humanity and consistency. And I think of Dr. King’s words delivered at Riverside Church in Manhattan, when he said: “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.” For so many today, myself included, the struggle for Palestinian human rights is also the struggle to save our collective soul. The Democratic Party, if we hope to retain our claim to being the party of dignity and decency, must be a party of consistency and one that stands up for the human rights of all people, without exception.

You have said you support Israel only as a state with equal rights for all – i.e. not a state that privileges adherents of a single religion — and have never marched in the Israel Day parade. How do you square skipping that parade and joining, say, the Pakistan Day Mela, another event celebrating the independence of a foreign nation that embeds religion into governance and has perpetual conflict with its neighbor?

I look forward to joining —and hosting — many community events celebrating Jewish life in New York and the rich Jewish history and culture of our city. While I will not be attending the Israel Day Parade, my lack of attendance should not be mistaken for a refusal to provide security or the necessary permits for its safety. I’ve been very clear: I believe in equal rights for all people—everywhere. That principle guides me consistently.

As mayor, you would control the city’s public school system. You’ve said you would introduce a curriculum that teaches “about the beauty and breadth of the Jewish experience.” Can you explain more about the vision for this curriculum, including who should create it, what grades should experience it, and how Israel would be addressed in it?

The Hidden Voices program is an existing curriculum that was launched in 2018 as an initiative to help students learn about the many “hidden” New Yorkers — including Jewish New Yorkers and others—who have helped shape the fabric of our city and what it has become. I will be a mayor who ensures that these New Yorkers are no longer hidden, and are taught in our schools. Additionally, our Department of Community Safety will invest in data-backed approaches that prevent violence through education and community-building.

Over the past week, 1,100-plus rabbis have signed a letter against the “political normalization” of anti-Zionism and expressing concerns that your criticism of Israel will make some Jewish New Yorkers less safe. How do you view their response to your campaign? Do you think anti-Zionist rhetoric could, in fact, have that effect on Jewish safety?

I’ve appreciated meeting with Jewish New Yorkers all around this city, talking about what we can do to build bridges, and I look forward to continuing to engage in productive dialogue. I hope they know that, whether or not they support or agree with me, I will always be a mayor who protects them and their communities. I don’t begrudge folks who are skeptical of me, especially with tens of millions of dollars having been spent against me with the intent to do just that, but I hope to prove that I am someone to build a relationship with, not one to fear.

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The post The JTA Q&A with Zohran Mamdani: ‘I don’t begrudge folks who are skeptical of me’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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HaKarot HaTov: Artificial Intelligence Can Never Replace Human Love and Wonder

Illustrative: Fourth grade students from Kibbutz Parod with certificates they received from the Israel Antiquities Authority for finding and turning in an ancient oil lamp. Photo: IAA.

One of the things that primary teachers regularly encounter is children calling them “mom” or “dad.” This is usually followed by serious embarrassment on behalf of the child, and possibly nervous laughter from their classmates.

Most teachers will just smooth incidents like this over, but the good ones will perhaps reflect on its underlying meaning — how in a very real sense for the child, they can temporarily become the child’s mother or father. It’s an expression of the incredibly important role teachers play in the lives of children, acting as the adult presence that bridges across from their family existence to their encounters with the larger world. This is what, unconsciously, children are tapping into when they mix up “mom” and “miss.”

Teachers are really important to kids — and the emotional investment that teachers make in children, and that children make in teachers, is enormous. Sometimes teachers can even provide the love and care that a child’s parents cannot. Teachers matter. Or at least they did.

What it seems the future holds, as AI models improve exponentially, is children each having their own AI-powered tutor responding in real time to their learning needs. AI’s ability to gauge the progress, challenges, and requirements of each child are likely far beyond anything a human teacher could ever hope to achieve. I don’t doubt that this is coming soon, and that many parents, and many governments, will be thinking of the undeniable benefits that these AI tutors will bring.

They don’t need a salary, they don’t need time off, and they can be there at any time of day. On top of that, millions of children are already using AI chat bots for emotional support. AI tutors will soon combine academic and emotional and pastoral support in one package. Unlike human teachers, they will never get tired, or angry, or disappointed, or get distracted from their charges’ needs.

We might wonder why any of this might be a problem. In a near future where robots will care for the elderly, do our shopping, and undertake surgery, and other AI bots will be our lawyers and accountants, as they already are our software engineers, why does it matter if children are taught by AI tutors?

Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps children and parents won’t be able to tell the difference, or even care if they can. Having human teachers won’t be important. Maybe we will just need a few humans to check if the AI tutors are on track to ensure that the kids of the future (or the kids of next year) learn enough to read and write, and to count well enough so that they don’t spend their universal basic income all at once.

I had a friend who was a great teacher who taught in Jewish schools in London. He died a decade ago, far too young. He was dyslexic and he told me how he used to share this with his pupils and get them to help him with his spelling on the board. A small thing perhaps, but I just think how much this communicated to those young people — about dealing with adversity, compassion, and empathy. I also remember how, when I was walking with him, we might bump into some of his old pupils. Always, they were so pleased to see him.

He was still “sir,” someone important in their lives, who had helped them navigate the path from their families, out to the world as independent adults. There was also, I would venture, something there that no robot teacher or AI tutor could ever truly have. That thing was love. The love that teachers bring to their work, that drives their professionalism and their commitment and care for the next generation.

Children know that teachers are not parents — that they only come into their lives for a short time and then leave. Yet they also know that just like their parents, teachers can love and care about them — really care about what happens to them. Children also learn how adults apart from their parents can, like my friend, not be perfect, and not know everything, but still set an example through their own behavior, and push them to achieve or keep going, even when it is challenging. They can feel how this connection with adults, with other human beings, molds and creates their adult selves.

Another thing that my friend’s pupils had was gratitude. As Dostoevsky wrote, gratitude is a fundamentally human quality, because someone has to give it, and someone has to receive it.  But Judaism recognized this decades before the Russian literary geniuses of the 19th century.

The Jewish concept of HaKarot HaTov or “Recognizing the Good” means gratitude, but it also implies something transcendent — the wonder of just taking the time to stop and reflect on what we have. HaKarot HaTov teaches us that it’s through gratitude to other people that we come closer to G-d. Large language models and algorithms don’t have aims, or desires, or feelings. They can’t love. AI tutors quite literally are incapable of caring whether the children they work with live or die. They can’t receive gratitude from their students, or give it, not really, because there is no “them.” Perhaps we should think more than twice before we sign up to an education system where children have no one to say thank you to.

Joseph Mintz is Professor of Inclusive Education at UCL. Follow him @jmintzuclacuk. His views are his own and do not reflect those of his employers.

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The Palestinian Authority Just Paid ‘Pay-for-Slay’ Salaries to 8,000 Terrorists

The opening of a hall that the Palestinian Authority named for a terrorist who killed 125 people. Photo: Palestinian Media Watch.

The mask is off: The Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that 8,000 terrorist prisoner pensioners would receive their monthly Pay-for-Slay “pension” salary this week — and confirmations of receipt of the deposits are already being observed over social media.

A Palestinian social media post confirming Pay-for-Slay payments have gone out.

The minimum amount for such salaries is 4,000 shekels for terrorists who spent five years in prison. Going by that minimum, the PA just paid these terrorists — which constitute only one third of all Pay-for-Slay recipients — at least 32 million shekels — over US $10 million.

However, in actuality, this most conservative estimate is far lower than the amount that was likely paid out, as some of the more infamous terrorists released in recent hostage deals have spent 30 or more years in prison. Terrorists with such status receive at least 12,000 shekels each month.

A chart detailing Palestinian payments to terrorists.

One year after PA President Mahmoud Abbas promised the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and the EU that he was ending Pay-for-Slay, there is no escaping the fact that this was just another deception and a lie.

The PA remains an unreformed sponsor of terror.

The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared. 

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Is Hebrew a European Language? Debunking Five Myths About Modern Hebrew

A researcher of MiDRASH, a project dedicated to analyzing the National Library of Israel’s digital database of all known Hebrew manuscripts using Machine Learning, including manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, holds up a 12th century fragment of a Yom Kippur liturgy in Jerusalem, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

If you spend enough time on social media, you’re likely going to come across claims about Hebrew that will make your head spin:

Hebrew is a European language.

Hebrew is actually stolen Arabic.

There is no connection between Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew.

For any student of Jewish history or a Hebrew speaker, these outrageous assertions are not just patently wrong — they’re utterly absurd.

Yet they are not random. They form part of a broader effort to delegitimize Zionism and deny the Jewish people’s historic ties to the Land of Israel. This piece examines some of those claims, and the facts that dismantle the myths.

Myth: Hebrew Was a Dead Language Until Eliezer Ben Yehuda Revived It

Hebrew was not a dead language before the late 19th century. But it was not yet the dynamic, everyday vernacular spoken today by millions in Israel and around the world.

To understand the roots of modern Hebrew, we first must go back to the second century C.E. Following the Roman suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Hebrew gradually declined as a spoken language among Jews in the Land of Israel, as Aramaic and other languages took precedence.

But Hebrew did not disappear and did not cease to exist as a language. Rather, it transitioned from a daily spoken language into a primarily literary and liturgical one, preserved in prayer, scholarship, poetry, legal discourse, and correspondence.

The Jewish legal corpus, the Mishnah, was written a number of centuries later in Hebrew.

Rabbinic commentaries, correspondence between different Jewish communities, and scholarly texts (including a medical textbook) were all written in Hebrew throughout late Antiquity and the Medieval periods. The first Hebrew printing press in the Land of Israel was established in the 16th century.

The Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries saw the emergence of Hebrew newspapers and a new Hebrew literature.

All of this occurred before Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s time.

What he sought to do was take the Hebrew language and turn it into a spoken tongue that would aid in the communication between Jews from different communities.

It is true that before Ben Yehuda arrived on the scene, there were Jews in the Land of Israel who spoke Hebrew. There were even attempts in the late 19th century to establish purely Hebrew schools in Ottoman Palestine. However, there were no speakers whose primary tongue was Hebrew or who were native Hebrew speakers. People could speak Hebrew on the street but would go home and speak in other languages to their family and friends.

Ben Yehuda’s Hebrew project saw the establishment of the first “Hebrew-language home,” with his son brought up in a strictly Hebrew-speaking environment.

The revival of Hebrew gained decisive momentum during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914), when waves of Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel embraced it not merely as a literary language, but as a spoken vernacular, with Hebrew officially adopted as the language of the Zionist movement in 1904.

By the time the British Mandate of Palestine was established in 1922, Hebrew was designated as one of the Mandate’s three official languages.

By 1948, 93 percent of Israeli children under the age of 15 used Hebrew as their primary language.

While Ben Yehuda is largely credited with starting this linguistic revolution, it was essentially a collaborative effort with his family members and other Hebraists expanding Hebrew’s vocabulary to turn it into the modern and dynamic language that we know today.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Is a European Language

Truth: One of the ways in which those opposed to the return of the Jews to their indigenous homeland cast doubt upon the connection between modern Israel and ancient Israel is by claiming that the Hebrew spoken today is not the same as that spoken in the land 2,000 years ago — and that modern Hebrew is, in fact, a European language.

This claim points to the revitalization of Hebrew by a European Jew, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and the adoption of words from European languages (such as English, German, Russian, and French) by the modern Hebrew dictionary.

However, this is a red herring.

All languages adopt terms from other languages. In ancient times, Hebrew manuscripts borrowed terms from neighboring languages such as Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin.

So, too, today modern Hebrew is influenced by foreign languages. The same with Arabic, English, Russian, and Japanese. Nearly all languages make some use of “loanwords.” Hebrew’s use of “loanwords” does not turn the language suddenly into a European tongue.

As we will see in the next section, despite the modern Hebrew dictionary being developed by a European Jew, modern Hebrew is based on Biblical Hebrew and is, indeed, a Semitic language.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Is Not a Semitic Language

Truth: Similar to the myth that modern Hebrew is a European language, people also make the absurd claim that modern Hebrew is not a Semitic language.

One of the main pieces of “evidence” cited for this claim is that the pronunciation of some Hebrew letters is different from the pronunciation in other Semitic tongues, like Arabic. The two most prominent letters that are brought up in this argument are the guttural Ayin and Het.

Of course, there are several points that undermine this claim.

First, pronunciation is not an indication of whether a language is Semitic or not.

As pointed out by Hebrew language researcher Elon Gilad, Semitic tongues are defined by their three-consonant roots, a structure that existed in Biblical Hebrew and continues to exist in modern Hebrew.

Second, even other Semitic languages feature different pronunciations based on geographic region. There are certain pronunciation differences between the Arabic spoken in Egypt and the Arabic spoken in Jordan and the Arabic spoken in Iraq. However, they are still considered Semitic languages.

Third, even some ancient peoples who spoke Semitic languages, such as the Akkadians and Samaritans, lost the glottal stop in their pronunciation. Yet, no one considered de-classifying their pronunciation as “Semitic.”

Lastly, the more guttural pronunciation of Hebrew is still practiced by some Israelis whose families came from Arabic-speaking lands, particularly the Yemenites. This does not make their Hebrew Semitic while the Hebrew of another Israeli, speaking the same exact words just in a different accent, would be considered a non-Semitic tongue.

Myth: Modern Hebrew is Based on Arabic

The opposite of the “Hebrew is European” myth is the equally false myth that modern Hebrew is based on Arabic.

According to this myth, a large percentage of modern Hebrew (some claim up to 80%) is made up of Arabic words.

As mentioned above, modern Hebrew does use “loanwords” from Arabic (as well as other languages) but its vocabulary and grammar are not a large-scale coopting of Arabic.

This myth is meant to deny the ties between Biblical and modern Hebrew, thus also severing the historic ties between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and depicting Israeli Jews as somehow fraudulent.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Speakers Cannot Understand Biblical Hebrew

It is true that modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are not the same.

However, it is not true that a modern Hebrew speaker would not understand the Bible.

While there are structural differences between the two Hebrews and there isn’t a 100 percent overlap between the two vocabularies, an educated Israeli would be able to open the Bible and understand a good portion of the Hebrew text.

Analysts have noted that the relationship between Biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew is much closer than the relationship between ancient Greek and modern Greek (which are considered linguistic relatives).

The relationship between Biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew is likened to the relationship between Shakespearean English and modern English. While the modern English speaker may not be able to read an entire play without assistance, they will recognize the language used by the Bard as being similar to their own tongue.

However, there are some who claim that a student of Biblical Hebrew (with no grounding in modern Hebrew) would not be able to understand a contemporary Hebrew text due to the developments that have taken place in the language.

That observation is hardly surprising. Languages evolve over centuries – English today would be barely intelligible to a reader of Chaucer. Yet evolution does not mean rupture. Modern Hebrew rests on the same grammatical foundations and core vocabulary that have bound Jewish texts and communities together for millennia.

Its revival was not the creation of something new, but the renewal of something enduring.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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