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Why rabbis across America are taking sides in New York’s mayoral race
Rabbi Danny Schiff had a rule: no national letters.
The community scholar of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh avoided open statements about far-off politics. But this month, he broke that rule — for a mayor’s race nearly 400 miles away.
“I never, ever, ever sign on to national rabbinic letters,” Schiff said. “And I made a lifetime exception for this particular instance.”
That exception was Zohran Mamdani — a New York state assemblyman, outspoken critic of Israel and, according to polls, the frontrunner to become the city’s first Muslim mayor. Schiff joined more than a thousand rabbis who signed an open letter opposing Mamdani, arguing that he “gives oxygen to anti-Zionist voices” and represents “a threatening reality for the American Jewish future.”
Schiff, who splits his time between Pittsburgh and Israel, said Mamdani’s campaign risks normalizing a “playbook” that other politicians might follow.
But not all rabbis saw danger in Mamdani’s rise. From Oregon to California to Illinois, other clergy have spoken out in support of him — or at least in defense of his right to run without being cast as a threat. The unusual spectacle of rabbis across the country weighing in on a New York City election has revealed deep fault lines over Israel, antisemitism, and what Jewish leadership looks like in 2025.
The question animating the debate is less who should be mayor of New York than what it means, right now, to speak as a rabbi in public life.
A new letter of solidarity
A new open letter published Tuesday, titled Jews for a Shared Future, gathered more than 150 signatures from rabbis, cantors, rabbinical students and Jewish leaders who reject efforts to frame Mamdani’s candidacy as a threat.
“As antisemitism and Islamophobia both rise in America, we understand that our fates are bound together,” the letter reads. “Jewish safety cannot be built on Muslim vulnerability, nor can we combat hate against our community while turning away from hate against our neighbors. Our traditions teach us that justice is indivisible — we are only truly safe when we ensure the safety and dignity of all. This is not merely strategic; it is sacred.”
The letter’s point person, Rabbi Shoshana Leis, co-rabbi with her husband of Pleasantville Community Synagogue in Westchester County, New York, said she wrote it after seeing how the national conversation about Mamdani had hardened into mutual accusation.
“I felt there needed to be a response,” she said. “I didn’t want to endorse any candidate, but I wanted to give an alternative perspective — the way we’re going to live safely is to engage across differences and choose our shared future.”
Leis called New York “our pluralistic, treasured city,” and said Jewish safety “is fully interdependent on the safety of everyone in New York City.” Her letter, she added, was meant to be “a letter against divisiveness.”
‘Mamdani has become the lightning rod’
Mamdani’s positions on Israel have roiled New York’s Jewish community — the largest in the United States — as he has faced scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” calling the Gaza war a “genocide,” and pledging to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits the city.
In Manhattan, two of the city’s most prominent rabbis took sharply different approaches to the campaign. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue openly urged congregants to back Andrew Cuomo, calling Mamdani a threat to Jewish security. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue reaffirmed her congregation’s stance against political endorsements.
Adding to the moment, a July ruling by the Internal Revenue Service said that clergy can now endorse political candidates without automatically jeopardizing their congregations’ tax-exempt status, a change that has effectively loosened decades-old restraints on rabbinic speech from the pulpit.
The divergent choices of Buchdahl and Cosgrove captured a new era in which rabbis, once shielded from electoral politics, now face pressure to take public stands in the age of livestreamed sermons and viral petitions.
From Los Angeles, Rabbi David Wolpe, emeritus of Sinai Temple, said the anxiety is less about New York policy than precedent. “It’s New York — and whatever happens in New York is, by definition, national news,” he said. “People worry that a mayor of a major city with Mamdani’s views creates both a permission structure and an incentive for others to follow.”
For Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who writes the newsletter Life Is a Sacred Text from Chicago, the controversy reflects deeper communal and generational shifts. “Mamdani has become the lightning rod for Jewish communal tensions,” she said. “All of our intra-communal tsuris — everything that had begun to boil over since Oct. 7 — needs a new place to manifest, and this is where it’s going.”
She said the uproar is less about New York than about Jewish anxiety. “People’s fears about ‘antisemitism on the left’ find prominent articulation here, while a whole world of antisemitism on the right is being left unaddressed,” she said.
“There has been a sea change in how an entire generation engages with Israel,” she continued. “Mamdani’s popularity with younger Jews is reflective of that. It’s easier to blame him than to grapple with how the conversation around Israel has changed nationally and globally.”
Ruttenberg added that if she lived in New York, she would endorse him. “He has said repeatedly that he’s going to increase hate crime funding by 800% in New York, a city that he is meant to serve. His priority is not foreign policy.
“He’s become symbolic of all of these fears that people have about so many other things that are not his to hold,” she said.
‘We don’t need rabbis fighting rabbis’
From Eugene, Oregon, Rabbi Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein of Temple Beth Israel — a Reconstructionist congregation of about 400 households — signed the Shared Future letter.
“It’s absolutely absurd that I’m weighing in on a New York City election,” she said. “But I do have a stake in how Jews and rabbis are publicly portrayed on a national scale.”
“I do think there is a manufactured panic that is very dangerous,” she added. “This is not the greatest threat to the Jewish people. This is a dangerous red herring.”
Not every rabbi fits neatly into one camp. Rabbi Suzanne Singer, emerita of Temple Beth El in Riverside, California, signed both letters — the one opposing Mamdani and the one urging solidarity.
“I hesitated before signing the first letter because I didn’t particularly want to attack one person,” she said. “I don’t think Mamdani is an antisemite. He’s an anti-Zionist, and there are plenty of Jews who are anti-Zionist. That doesn’t make him an outlier.”
Singer said she worries about rhetoric that casts Israelis as “settler colonialists,” and believes Israel and the Palestinians both have the right to self-determination. But she was also drawn to the second letter’s message. “We have to find a way to work together and live together,” she said. “Antisemitism is enough — we don’t need rabbis fighting rabbis.”
She expects some overlap between signatories of both letters. “The first letter, I wish it hadn’t targeted Mamdani so directly,” she said. “Everything has gotten to be black and white — there’s no nuance, no complicated narrative anymore.”
The moral crossroads
For Schiff, the Pittsburgh rabbi who broke his lifetime rule, the issue is existential. “Clearly Mamdani has made it his business to let everybody know what his views are on Israel — in the largest Jewish city in America,” he said. “Other politicians around the country might take note.”
“The end of the kinetic war has not brought an end to the war of delegitimization against Israel,” Schiff added. “If you can’t beat Israel militarily, then the anti-Zionism campaign becomes the favored route for aggression.”
Ruttenberg sees something different in that lightning. “If we think that magically defeating Mamdani will somehow return us to the way things used to be,” she said, “that is not what is going to be the outcome.”
She also questioned the moral calculus behind the opposition’s preferred candidate. “If we want to talk about Torah values,” she said, “Cuomo is a serial sexual abuser who spent $20 million of taxpayer money paying for his defense. In what way do my colleagues think this is any representation of either pragmatic or ethical values?”
Her conclusion was blunt, and hopeful. “When we make choices out of fear, it tends to end badly,” she said. “And when we choose based on building relationships and solidarity — understanding that our liberation is bound up with everyone else’s — that’s how we win, as Jews and as people.”
Jacob Kornbluh contributed to this article.
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The call of this Hanukkah moment remains simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere. Even when we’re under attack.
The massacre in Sydney has left Jews around the world shaken and grieving. This act is far more than a heinous crime: It is a regression to darker times, when Jewish visibility itself carried mortal risk.
The commandment of Hanukkah is not simply to light candles, but to light them publicly – pirsumei nisa, the publicizing of the miracle. The point is not private consolation, but shared visibility. Jewish survival, the tradition teaches, is not meant to occur behind closed doors, but in full view.
Historically, however, it rarely did. In exile, Jews learned caution. The Talmud records how, in times of danger, the candles are to be moved indoors – lit discreetly, shielded from hostile eyes. This was not a theological revision but a concession to reality: When the public sphere is unsafe, Jewish life retreats into the private domain. For most of our history, this was our reality.
Modern democracies promised something different. Jews would no longer have to choose between safety and visibility. We could light openly again – on windowsills, in public squares, in front of city halls – because the surrounding society would protect us not merely by law, but by norm. Antisemitism would not just be illegal, it would be unthinkable.
The Sydney massacre, alongside countless incidents in societies Jews have long trusted, forces us to ask whether that promise is still being kept.
Jewish safety in the diaspora does not rest primarily on police presence or intelligence services – necessary though they are. It rests on something more fragile and more fundamental: a public culture in which Jews are not merely tolerated but embraced; in which antisemitism is not merely condemned after the fact but rejected instinctively and unequivocally as a violation of the moral order.
When Jews are attacked for being Jews, and the response is muted, conditional, or delayed, the message is unmistakable. Jews may still live here, but only quietly.
That is why the response to Sydney must not be withdrawal, but the exact opposite. We cannot and will not retreat into hiding our light. The call of this moment is simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere.
Jewish communities and organizations must orchestrate public Hanukkah candle lightings in the central squares of democratic cities across Europe, across the English-speaking world, wherever Jews live under the protection of free societies. Not hidden ceremonies. Not fenced-off gatherings on the margins. But civic events, hosted openly and proudly, with the participation of local and national leaders – and of fellow non-Jewish citizens.
This is not unprecedented. Every year, a Hanukkah menorah is lit at the White House. The symbolism is powerful precisely because it is mundane: Jewish light belongs at the heart of the civic space, not as an exception, not as an act of charity, but as a matter of course. That model should now be replicated widely.
Israeli diplomatic missions, together with local Jewish organizations, should work actively with municipalities and governments to make these public lightings happen – not merely as acts of Jewish resilience, but as declarations of democratic commitment. Because this is not only a Jewish question.
A society in which Jews feel compelled to hide their symbols is a society already retreating from its own values. Antisemitism is never a stand-alone phenomenon; it is the canary in the democratic coal mine. Where Jews are unsafe, pluralism is already fraying.
Lighting candles in public squares will not undo the horror of Sydney. But it will answer it – not with fear, and not with silence, but with a refusal to normalize xenophobia, antisemitism, and Jewish invisibility.
The ancient question of Hanukkah – where we light – has returned as a modern moral test of democratic societies and leaders worldwide. Where Jewish light is extinguished, democracy itself is cast into shadow. If it can still be lit openly, with the full backing of the societies Jews call home, then the promise of democratic life remains alive.
Our light must not hide. Not now. Never again.
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Australia shooting terrifies Jews worldwide — and strengthens the case for Israel
If the shooters who targeted Jews on a beach in Australia while they were celebrating Hanukkah thought their cowardly act would turn the world against Israel, they were exactly wrong: Randomly killing people at a holiday festival in Sydney makes the case for Israel.
The world wants Jews to disown Israel over Gaza, but bad actors keep proving why Jews worldwide feel such an intense need to have a Jewish state.
Think about it. The vast majority of Jews who settled in Israel went there because they felt they had nowhere else to go. To call the modern state “the ingathering of exiles” softpedals reality and tells only half the story. The ingathering was a result of an outpouring of hate and violence.
Attacking Jews is the best way to rationalize Zionism.
Judaism’s holidays are often (humorously) summarized as, “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.” Zionism is simply, “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s move.”
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, didn’t have a religious or even a tribal bone in his body. He would have been happy to stay in Vienna writing light plays and eating sacher torte. But bearing witness to the rise of antisemitism, he saw the Land of Israel as the European Jew’s best option.
The Eastern European pogroms, the Holocaust, the massacre of Jews in Iraq in 1941 — seven years before the State of Israel was founded — the attacks on Jews throughout the Middle East after Israel’s founding, the oppression of Jews in the former Soviet Union — these were what sent Jews to Israel.
How many Australians are thinking the same way this dark morning?
There’s a lot to worry about in Israel. It is, statistically, more dangerous to be Jewish there than anywhere else in the world. But most Jews would rather take their chances on a state created to protect them, instead of one that just keeps promising it will – especially when the government turns a blind eye to antisemitic incitement and refuses to crack down on violent protests, as Australia has.
“For over a year we have seen racist mobs impeding on the rights and freedoms of ordinary Australians. We have been locked out of parts of our cities because the police could not ensure our safety. Students have been told to stay away from campuses. We have been locked down in synagogues,” Alex Ryvchin, the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, wrote a year ago, after the firebombing attack on a Melbourne synagogue.
Since then a childcare centre in Sydney’s east was set alight by vandals, cars were firebombed, two Australian nurses threatened to kill Jewish patients, to name a few antisemitic incidents. There were 1,654 antisemitic incidents logged in Australia from October 2024 to September 2025 — in a country with about 117,000 Jews.
“The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it,” the philosopher Yuval Noah Harari said. He was talking about the invasion of Iraq after 9/11, the crackdown on civil liberties and legitimate protest. But surely it’s equally dangerous to underreact to terrorism and terrorist rhetoric.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 led to worldwide protests, which is understandable, if not central to why tensions have escalated.
But condemning civilian casualties and calling for Palestinian self-determination — something many Jews support — too often crosses into calls for destroying Israel, demonizing Israelis and their Jews. That’s how Jews heard the phrase “globalize the intifada” — as a justification for the indiscriminate violence against civilians.
When they took issue with protesters cosplaying as Hamas and justifying the Oct. 7 massacre, that’s what they meant. And look at what happened in Bondi Beach, they weren’t wrong. Violence leads to violence, and so does support for violence.
Chabad, which hosted the Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, has always leaned toward a more open door policy with less apparent security than other Jewish institutions. But one of the reasons it has been so effective at outreach has also made it an easy target.
As a result of the Bondi shooting, Chabad will likely increase security, as will synagogues around the world. Jewish institutions will think hard about publicly advertising their events. Law enforcement and public officials will, thankfully, step up protection, at least for a while. These are all the predictable result of an attack that, given the unchecked antisemitic rhetoric and weak responses to previous antisemitic incidents, was all but inevitable.
It’s not inevitable that Australian Jews would now move to Israel, no more than it would have been for Pittsburgh’s Jewish community to uproot itself and move to Tel Aviv after the 2018 Tree of Life massacre. That didn’t happen, because ultimately the risk still doesn’t justify it.
But these shootings, and the constant drip of violent rhetoric, vandalism and confrontation raise a question: If you want to kill Jews in Israel, and you kill them outside Israel, where, exactly, are we supposed to go?
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These are the victims of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration shooting in Sydney
(JTA) — A local rabbi, a Holocaust survivor and a 12-year-old girl are among those killed during the shooting attack Sunday on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia.
Here’s what we know about the 11 people murdered in the attack, which took place at a popular beachside playground where more than 1,000 people had congregated to celebrate the first night of the holiday, as well as about those injured.
This story will be updated.
Eli Schlanger, rabbi and father of five
Schlanger was the Chabad emissary in charge of Chabad of Bondi, which had organized the event. He had grown up in England but moved to Sydney 18 years ago, where he was raising his five children with his wife Chaya. Their youngest was born just two months ago.
In addition to leading community events through Chabad of Bondi, Schlanger worked with Jewish prisoners in Australian prisons. “He flew all around the state, to go visit different people in jail, literally at his own expense,” Mendy Litzman, a Sydney Jew who responded as a medic to the attack, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Last year, amid a surge in antisemitic incidents in Australia, Schlanger posted a video of himself dancing and celebrating Hanukkah, promoting lighting menorahs as “the best response to antisemitism.”
The best response to antisemitism. Happy Chanukah! pic.twitter.com/33RSGYzhUY
— Rabbi Eli Schlanger (@SchlangerEli) December 17, 2024
Two months before his murder, he published an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urging him to rescind his “act of betrayal” of the Jewish people. The letter was published on Facebook the same day, Sept. 21, that Albanese announced he would unilaterally recognize an independent Palestinian state.
Alex Kleytman, Holocaust survivor originally from Ukraine
Kleytman had come to the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration annually for years, his wife Larisa told The Australian. She said he was protecting her when he was shot. The couple, married for six decades, has two children and 11 grandchildren.
The Australia reported that Kleytman was a Holocaust survivor who had passed World War II living with his family in Siberia.
12-year-old girl
Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told CNN that a friend “lost his 12-year-old daughter, who succumbed to her wounds in hospital.” The girl’s name was not immediately released.
Dozens of people were injured
- Yossi Lazaroff, the Chabad rabbi at Texas A&M University, said his son had been shot while running the event for Chabad of Bondi. “Please say Psalms 20 & 21 for my son, Rabbi Leibel Lazaroff, יהודה לייב בן מאניא who was shot in a terrorist attack at a Chanukah event he was running for Chabad of Bondi in Sydney, Australia,” he tweeted.
- Yaakov “Yanky” Super, 24, was on duty for Hatzalah at the event when he was shot in the back, Litzman said. “He started screaming on his radio that he needs back up, he was shot. I heard it and I responded to the scene. I was the closest backup. I was one of the first medical people on the scene,” Litzman said. He added, “We just went into action and saved a lot of lives, including one of our own.”
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