To mark his first 100 days in office, Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, talked about how many potholes he has filled. He should be focusing on mending his relationship with New York City’s Jews, according to Jewish leaders.
“Unfortunately, in his first 100 days, Mayor Mamdani has done nothing to allay the concerns I expressed before the election regarding his stance on Israel and the safety of Jewish New Yorkers,” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, who leads Park Avenue Synagogue, a Conservative congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told JNS.
Mamdani, who is Muslim, has said that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in the Big Apple, and his spokeswoman said that synagogues violate international law by hosting pro-Israel events.
“At a moment when anti-Israel rhetoric is increasingly bleeding into antisemitic violence, from Bondi to West Bloomfield, Mich., his refusal to recognize that danger, coupled with the voices he elevates and the company he keeps, reflects a troubling mix of naïveté and negligence toward the very communities he has been entrusted to protect,” Cosgrove told JNS.
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, spiritual leader of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation on the Upper West Side, told JNS that he hopes that Mamdani “avoids rhetoric and policies that reflect his antagonism towards Israel.”
“There is enough for him to do just to run the city. One place to start would be to cease accusing Israel of ‘genocide.’ It is a modern-day blood libel,” Hirsch said.
Moshe Davis, who ran the mayoral office to combat Jew-hatred under Eric Adams, Mamdani’s predecessor, and a frequent critic of the current mayor, told JNS that Mamdani could have made better choices than attending and hosting Passover events that emphasized aspects of the holiday other than the redemptive one that pines for “next year in Jerusalem.”
“One hopes the mayor actually opened the traditional haggadah during his many Seder photo-ops this year rather than just using our traditions for optics,” Davis told JNS.
“Had he, he would have learned that we are an ancient nation with an ancestral homeland,” Davis said. “Mayor Mamdani claims he’s not an antisemite and says he’ll commit resources to fight anti-Jewish hate. So far, it seems like the Jewish community’s concerns are not a priority for this administration.”
Abby Stein, a progressive rabbi who grew up Chassidic and identifies as transgender, stood behind Mamdani at the mayor’s event on Sunday evening marking 100 days in office. Stein held a sign saying “pothole politics” and wore a shirt saying “rabbis for ceasefire.”
Stein told JNS that Jews ought to be impressed with Mamdani, since the mayor attended Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah services at Stein’s independent synagogue.
The mayor “sat through the whole 2.5 hour-service and really enjoyed it,” Stein told JNS. “Most Jews don’t do that.”
Stein, who served on Mamdani’s transition committee after his election, told JNS that the mayor is “1,000,000% not antisemitic.”
The Mamdani supporter also thinks that the mayor showed his concern for Jews by naming Phylisa Wisdom, whose appointment drew extensive criticism, to lead the mayoral office to fight Jew-hatred.
“The fact that we got someone appointed to the antisemitism office in a month is saying something,” Stein told JNS. “These are important things.”
Davis, who held the role before Wisdom, told JNS that under Mamdani, New York City is seeing an alarming rate of Jew-hatred.
NYPD statistics bear that out, including more than a 180% increase in Jew-hatred in the city in Mamdani’s first month in office. Despite changing the way it reports hate crime statistics twice already during Mamdani’s mayoralty, the New York City Police Department has still recorded a disproportionate percentage of hate crimes targeting Jews.
“Instead of action, we get photo-ops with friendly Jewish audiences, silence on his wife’s support for terror and appearances alongside those who chant ‘strike, strike Tel Aviv,’” Davis told JNS. “Anti-Jewish hate crimes make up more than 55% of all hate crimes in this city.”
Davis also said that he gave the mayor a 100-day plan to protect Jewish New Yorkers in January, before he left his city role. “We are all still waiting,” he said.
