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Two Jewish Moral Worlds: What the Mamdani Election Reveals
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
When a single election lays bare a community’s conscience, it deserves more than punditry.
The recent victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York’s Democratic primary was more than a political surprise. It was a sociological revelation — a moment that exposed the moral divide within American Jewry and the fragility of its civic cohesion.
The Times of Israel exit poll tells the story plainly: roughly 63 percent of Jewish voters supported Andrew Cuomo, while a third backed Mamdani, the far-left candidate known for his fierce criticism of Israel and his support for the BDS movement. But the aggregate numbers obscure something more profound. Beneath the data lies a moral geography that splits the community itself; between Brooklyn’s progressive brownstones and Manhattan’s traditional bastions, between younger universalists and older particularists, between two rival moral languages of what it means to be Jewish in America.
In the brownstone belts of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Clinton Hill, Mamdani dominated. His margins in some precincts approached 90 percent. These are neighborhoods filled with young professionals, educators, and creatives: Jews who are largely non-Orthodox, highly educated, and politically left-leaning.
They belong to a generation whose moral formation occurred as much on social media as in synagogue pews. Across the East River, in Borough Park, Crown Heights, and the Upper East Side, Cuomo’s support exceeded 80 percent. These precincts are wealthier, older, and denser, with day-school graduates, Federation donors, and Israel mission alumni. One city, two moral worlds.
Political psychology offers a framework for understanding this divergence.
Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham’s Moral Foundations Theory describes human moral reasoning as rooted in several intuitive “foundations.” The first pair — Care and Fairness — orient toward empathy, equality, and the mitigation of harm. The second set — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — prioritize group solidarity, respect for tradition, and the protection of what is sacred.
Liberals, Haidt’s research found, tend to emphasize the individualizing foundations of care and fairness; conservatives draw upon all five, including those that bind the group together. These moral instincts operate beneath conscious ideology, shaping the stories people tell about justice, duty, and belonging.
Applied to Jewish life, this model illuminates the Mamdani divide. The younger, Park Slope cohort embodies the individualizing moral style. Their Judaism is ethical universalism — a faith of empathy, repair, and inclusion. To them, Jewish history teaches solidarity with the marginalized, not tribal defense. Their political commitments — tenant rights, climate action, anti-racism, and Palestinian solidarity — feel like moral extensions of their Jewish conscience.
Supporting Mamdani, in this light, is not an act of betrayal but an act of consistency. The Upper East Side cohort, by contrast, lives in the binding moral register. Their Judaism centers on loyalty to the Jewish people, reverence for institutions, and defense of Israel as a sacred trust. When a candidate denounces Israel as genocidal, they hear not critique but violation. The vote for Cuomo was not a calculation of interests; it was an affirmation of covenant.
Survey data confirm that these moral worlds align with generational and institutional divides. Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey found that only 45 percent of Jews under 35 hold a favorable view of Israel’s government, compared with 64 percent among those over 50.
Yet nearly 90 percent across all ages still view the Israeli people positively, suggesting alienation not from Israel itself but from its political expression.
Pew’s 2021 study showed that 58 percent of American Jews feel emotionally attached to Israel, though that attachment rises to 82 percent among the Orthodox and drops below 60 percent among Reform and unaffiliated Jews. Twenty-two percent now believe the United States is too supportive of Israel — twice the share in 2013 — and that sentiment is concentrated among younger and unaffiliated
Jews. Another 2024 survey by the Benenson Strategy Group found that nearly four in five American Jews still feel close to Israel, and 72 percent say Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, yet 62 percent admit they “sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel or its government.” The picture that emerges is not rejection but tension: enduring identity, waning confidence, moral ambivalence.
This moral bifurcation has deep civic consequences. For much of the 20th century, American Jews reconciled universal and particular obligations through robust institutions. Federations linked philanthropy for the poor to support for Israel. Synagogues fused civic virtue with covenantal belonging. Community centers cultivated the habits of service, dialogue, and shared space.
Those integrative structures made it possible to balance empathy and loyalty within a single communal framework. But as institutional participation has declined, moral formation now occurs in fragmented spaces — online, on campuses, within activist networks — where individual conscience replaces institutional mediation. The result is that empathy and loyalty, once twin pillars of Jewish civic life, now compete rather than complement.
When moral authority fragments, politics becomes identity by proxy. The universalist moral vocabulary of younger Jews often renders Jewish power suspect; the particularist vocabulary of their elders renders dissent heretical. The two sides no longer disagree over policy; they inhabit different moral cosmologies. That is why the Mamdani election felt seismic to the Jewish community and New York City more generally. It revealed, not created, the split between what might be called the “individualizing Jew” and the “binding Jew” — one who sees Judaism as a moral compass for humanity, the other who sees it as the covenantal anchor of a people.
The consequences are not merely internal. A cohesive Jewish community has long served as a vital civic intermediary, connecting minority experience to national ideals. Fragmentation weakens that role. When a third of Jewish voters champion a candidate who accuses Israel of genocide and two-thirds recoil in outrage, institutional consensus becomes nearly impossible. Jewish organizations struggle to articulate shared positions on campus speech, antisemitism, or Israel policy because the moral foundations beneath those debates differ.
The binding moral language of loyalty and sanctity, once the lingua franca of Jewish life, now strikes many younger Jews as exclusionary or even coercive. Yet without it, solidarity itself erodes.
This tension certainly mirrors the broader democratic malaise. Across the West, younger generations are shifting from binding to individualizing moral frameworks — from “who we are” to “whom we protect.” That shift, born of compassion, often dissolves the collective bonds that sustain civic trust. The Jewish community’s fracture is thus a microcosm of the American one. If one of the nation’s most institutionally successful minorities cannot sustain moral coherence across generations, the prospects for the larger democracy are sobering.
Still, Jewish tradition offers a path forward. The Hebrew Bible itself balances competing moral imperatives: love the stranger (Care), pursue justice (Fairness), remember you were slaves in Egypt (Loyalty), honor your parents (Authority), and be holy (Sanctity). The moral genius of Judaism has always been its capacity to integrate rather than choose. A renewed Jewish civic life would recover that synthesis — not by diluting conviction, but by translating between moral dialects.
Doing so requires moral bilingualism. Jewish leaders must learn to speak both the language of empathy and the language of obligation. They must show younger Jews that loyalty need not mean blind allegiance, and show older Jews that care need not mean disavowal. Institutions that can bridge those vocabularies — pairing service projects with Jewish learning, coupling justice work with covenantal memory — will thrive. Those that cannot will wither into echo chambers. The task is to rebuild spaces where the moral foundations overlap, where the passion for fairness coexists with respect for continuity, and where dissent strengthens rather than fractures community.
The Mamdani election dramatized the challenge. It showed that American Jews are not divided between left and right so much as between two moral imaginations.
The future of American Jewish life — and perhaps something of American civic life itself — depends on reuniting those halves. The task is not to pick sides between the moral foundations, but to recover their harmony. That would mean re-embedding compassion within community and rooting loyalty in moral reflection. It would mean building institutions capable of moral translation rather than moral policing. It would mean acknowledging that Jewish flourishing and democratic stability alike require both conscience and covenant.
The Mamdani election did not create this divide, it exposed it. The challenge now is whether American Jews can build a third moral script, one that joins care to continuity, justice to responsibility, empathy to endurance. That work begins by recognizing that not all differences are merely moral styles. Mamdani’s campaign trafficked in ideas that crossed into antisemitism — denying Jewish self-determination, vilifying Israel as inherently criminal, and normalizing hostility toward Jewish identity itself.
A community committed to moral dialogue cannot ignore such realities; tolerance cannot mean the abdication of judgment. Yet if Jews can still hold fast to both conscience and covenant — defending themselves without surrendering compassion, seeking justice without erasing solidarity — they can model for the nation how moral diversity becomes democratic strength. Democracy, like Judaism, survives not on unanimity but on the hard, often uncomfortable work of moral conversation and that work begins with the courage to confront hatred without forfeiting humanity.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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UAE Rules Out Joining Gaza Stabilization Force for Now, Backs Peace Efforts
Aid donated by the UAE for the people of Gaza is stored in a warehouse at the port of Limassol, Cyprus, Nov. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yiannis Kourtoglou
The United Arab Emirates does not yet see a clear framework for the proposed international stability force in Gaza and, under the current circumstances, will not take part, a senior Emirati official said on Monday.
Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, said Abu Dhabi would continue to support political efforts toward peace and remain a leading provider of humanitarian aid.
“The region remains fragile, yet there is reason for cautious optimism,” he told the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate.
The Gaza ceasefire deal aimed at ending hostilities between Israel and Hamas was brokered by the United States, with Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey also mediating.
Washington has drafted a United Nations Security Council resolution proposing a two-year mandate for a transitional governance body and an international stabilization force in Gaza.
The force, known as the International Stabilization Force (ISF), would be authorized to “use all necessary measures” to demilitarize Gaza, protect civilians and aid deliveries, secure Gaza‘s borders, and support a newly trained Palestinian police force, according to a draft seen by Reuters.
US President Donald Trump said last week that the stabilization force for Gaza would deploy “very soon,” adding that “Gaza is working out very well.”
The US has approached several countries, including Indonesia, the UAE, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, about contributing to the force, a senior US official had told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Israel has ruled out Turkish participation. Azerbaijan has said it does not plan to send peacekeepers to Gaza unless there is a complete halt to fighting.
Though Washington has ruled out sending US soldiers into Gaza, the US official said around two dozen US troops were in the region in coordination and oversight roles to help prepare for the potential deployment.
Gargash said progress over Gaza depended on reaffirming the principles of the Abraham Accords – dialogue, coexistence, and cooperation – as the only sustainable path to a viable Palestinian state. The UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco established ties with Israel under the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020.
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IAEA Inspectors Visited Iranian Nuclear Sites Last Week, Foreign Ministry Says
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi arrives on the opening day of the agency’s quarterly Board of Governors meeting at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Nov. 20, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
Inspectors of the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA visited Iranian nuclear sites last week, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson said on Monday, according to state media, a week after the IAEA urged Iran to “seriously improve” cooperation.
The IAEA has carried out about a dozen inspections in Iran since hostilities with Israel in June, but last week highlighted it had not been given access to nuclear facilities such as Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, which were bombed by the United States.
“As long as we are a member of the NPT [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons], we will abide by our commitments, and just last week, IAEA inspectors visited several nuclear facilities, including the Tehran Research Reactor,” Esmaeil Baghaei said, without naming the others.
The International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said last week that Iran must “seriously improve” cooperation with the United Nations inspectors to avoid heightening tensions with the West.
Iranian officials have blamed the IAEA for providing a justification for Israel’s bombing in a 12-day war in June, which began the day after the IAEA board voted to declare Iran in violation of obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Baghaei’s comments on Monday were in response to Grossi saying last week that Iran “cannot say ‘I remain within the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons treaty,’ and then not comply with obligations.”
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The immigrant NYers Zohran Mamdani cherishes all feel warmth for their homelands. Why can’t Jews?
My family was never American; we were New Yorkers. My great-grandparents came from the old country to the Lower East Side as children; they moved to Harlem and to the Bronx and there they raised my grandparents. My grandparents married and moved to Great Neck, which was not yet a Jewish suburb, where my father was born and raised. And then in their 20s my parents moved back into the city, to the Upper West Side, in the late 1960s, where a few years later I was born and raised. Until the age of 46, I’d lived in New York City almost all my life.
I adore the city and everything about it. What I love most about it, I think, was what the great Jewish New Yorker Horace Kallen called its “cultural pluralism.” New York is a vast collection of different nationalities — the greatest such collection ever assembled in one place — all living together, neighborhood by neighborhood. The City (there is only this one City) and not the soulless slab of glass and concrete jutting out of Turtle Bay, is the true United Nations.
New Yorkers hail from over 150 different nations; there are enormous populations of Dominicans, Chinese, Mexicans and Guyanese, Jamaicans, Ecuadorians, Haitians, Indians, Russians, and Trinidadians, Bangladeshis and more, blanketing the city from Arthur Avenue in the Bronx out to Flushing and down to the Rockaways. Subway signs are written in four, five, six languages; each train car some space shuttle out of Star Trek, teeming with New Yorkers of every possible complexion and dress from every corner of the globe.
So I was very moved when Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani spoke in his acceptance speech last week of “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas; Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses; Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties” all of whom, he said, had turned out to vote for him. And I was deeply moved by his vision of returning the city to its everyday, working class people, so that New York might “remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant.” (Whether this speech accurately reflected his actual median voter, who was more likely to be a recent college graduate living in Bushwick than a working mother of four in Flushing, is another matter.)
But as he spoke, I turned to thinking about Ibrahim, a young handsome Yemeni who ran his family bodega around the corner from my former home in Brooklyn. We used to speak about Yemen — he had strong views about which Yemeni singers I should listen to — and how much he loved and missed it; he and his cousins would travel back there to stay for years at a time, returning to Brooklyn to earn and send remittances home. And I thought of all the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cab drivers I’ve had over the years, and how every last one of them told me about the house they’d always dreamt of building in the countryside of Pakistan or Bangladesh, for their parents if not for them or their now-local children. I thought of the apartment of the girl who lived downstairs from me in the building I grew up in on West 90th street, with whom I was half in love, her family Trinidadian Indians, and the apartment heavy with plants and oversized rattan furniture and the moist exhaust of the humidifier that was always blowing; her apartment felt, I imagined, like Trinidad itself, and the curry tasted as it did back home. And I think always of Delsie, the Jamaican woman who cared for me when my mother went back to work, who scolded and spoiled me and regaled me with stories about Montego Bay.
All of my fellow New Yorkers loved their home across the ocean; all of them sent money and love to their families and countrymen, sustaining that tie as much as they could.
And the Jews? Well, we were the same, but also different. For one thing, we had been in the city longer. We’d left our mark on the Lower East Side where my Chinese-Brazilian best friend lived generations ago, on its landscape and on its idiom, but we’d long moved on to other neighborhoods, as the progress of my own family demonstrates. But also, according to Horace Kallen, the Jews of his day (the 1910s) were different from the other immigrant communities of New York in the way they related to the Old Country:
[Jews] do not come to the United States from truly native lands, lands of their proper natio and culture. They come from lands of sojourn, where they have been for ages treated as foreigners, at most as semi-citizens, subject to disabilities and persecutions. They come with no political aspirations against the peace of other states such as move the Irish, the Poles, the Bohemians. They come with the intention to be completely incorporated into the body-politic of the state. . . .
Yet, once the wolf is driven from the door and the Jewish immigrant takes his place in our society a free man and an American, he tends to become all the more a Jew. The cultural unity of his race, history and background is only continued by the new life under the new conditions. The Jewish quarter. . . has its sectaries, its radicals, its artists, its literati; its press, its literature, its theater, its Yiddish and its Hebrew, its Talmudical colleges and its Hebrew schools, its charities and its vanities, and its coordinating organization, the Kehilla, all more or less duplicated wherever Jews congregate in mass. Here not religion alone, but the whole world of radical thinking, carries the mother-tongue and the father-tongue, with all that they imply.
This was the position of the Jews of New York until mid-century; a “nation and culture” without a homeland to pine for.
But, of course, then the Jews — like the Irish, and the Poles, and the Czechs — regained a homeland. And fitfully, not without controversy and dissension, we, too, came to love it, and maintain a deep, unbreakable attachment to it, and seek to support it. In this, we became like the Poles and Irish and Czechs — and also like the Armenians and the Macedonians and, yes, the Palestinians, supporting “political aspirations” for our people that can rub up “against the peace of other states”). Such is the complexity of national attachments. And some of us, in fact, were so deeply attached that we left our first love, the city of our birth, to upbuild it.
I won’t argue that what Israel is to New York Jews is identical to what Yemen is to Ibrahim. The Jews’ homeland is different from other homelands, because Jewish history is different from other peoples’ history. But it’s just as precious to us. And listening to Mamdani, I wondered why his Whitmanesque reveries have no room for that attachment. I wondered why, based on his past statements, he intended not to embrace our love and grief for Israel but instead — by seeking to localize his longest-standing political priority — to turn the grievances of his Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas and Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses and Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties against us and against the Jewish homeland.
I realize that I am homesick for a city that was also a Jewish city, my city, that I fear is gone. And the pain that I felt when the new mayor summoned a vision of that vanished city — an ersatz vision, with no room in its heart for Jews as we really are — was a deep pain.
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