Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, praised Zohran Mamdani—the antisemitic, socialist New York state representative who, having secured the Democratic nomination, is challenging him in the upcoming mayoral race—in an Aug. 1 interview.
Nayeema Raza asked Adams if he’d rather be stuck in an elevator with Mamdani or his other opponents, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo or Republican candidate and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.
“Probably Mamdani,” Adams said on Raza’s Smart Girl Dumb Questions podcast. “We had dinner together. We had a good conversation.”
“His dad came. He came. We had a great conversation. You could disagree without being disagreeable. We just philosophically disagree,” Adams told Raza. “I think his policies are hurtful. I think they’re not fully flushed out, and they don’t understand the ramification. But I’m not saying that I dislike a person.”
Mamdani has accused the Jewish state of “genocide,” of having “massacred Palestinian babies in Rafah” and “apartheid,” and he has said that he would have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if the premier visited the Big Apple.
Adams told Raza that there has been Islamophobia in response to Mamdani’s campaign.
“There are people who are saying very hurtful and harmful things. Listen, there are people in New York who have hate in their heart. We can’t lie about that,” he said. “But look where I have been on this subject. When a young woman was attacked for wearing a hijab years ago, I went out and visited her and took the bus into Staten Island to say this can’t happen.”
“When someone put out a flyer saying ‘kill a Muslim day,’ I walked the street with my Muslim brothers and sisters and said, ‘This cannot happen in our city,’” he said. “During 9/11, I was a police officer at the time. On Coney Island Avenue during 9/11, there were major sweeps in that community that young men were picked up. I went to 3rd Avenue and 30-something Street where the federal penitentiary is located and called for their release. I said, ‘This is wrong what we’re doing to these young men.’”
“I stood with Jewish brothers and sisters, Sikh community when they attacked, Asian American and Pacific Islander community,” he said. “There’s a history of me saying ‘hate has no place in New York.’”
Adams also decried Jew-hatred on campuses in New York City and appeared to recognize a Palestinian state—contrary to U.S. policy—during the interview.
The mayor told Raza that the New York City Police Department couldn’t intervene on private campuses unless schools invited them.
“I would have gone on day one, because you should not disrupt those who want to go to school for their education. I saw some of the videos, spitting at the Jewish students, harassing them, surrounding them,” he said. “I saw those videos.”
Adams said that he wouldn’t want his son, Jordan, to go to a school where “people are calling him the N-word, surrounding him, threatening him and him coming home and saying, ‘Dad, you’re paying $80,000 a year and I cannot sit in my school?’ No.”
“If you want to protest, protest peacefully. You don’t target students based on their ethnicity. I wouldn’t want it to be done to a black student,” he said. “I saw what happened to the Asian students during COVID. It was wrong then and it was wrong for it to happen to the Jewish students.”
Raza asked Adams what role the New York City mayor has “when it comes to the Middle East, to Israel and Palestine and the communities who support each of those communities.”
Adams told her that he is “probably the only mayor that has visited Palestine. Visited Palestine and Israel,” he said. (Washington does not recognize a Palestinian state and sat out a United Nations event on a two-state solution last week.)
“I think that what plays out on the international stage, it plays out on our streets in New York,” Adams said. We have to coexist in the city, and I’ve done it over and over again.”
