The New York City mayoral race has narrowed to three candidates after Mayor Eric Adams dropped out on Sunday. But polling suggests that it will do little to increase the odds for former state governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa to defeat the Democratic frontrunner, state representative Zohran Mamdani, in the election come November.
Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large of Tablet magazine, told JNS that the real lesson that New York Jews should take from oa victory for Mamdani, if that occurs, would be that the a community with a “plethora” of Jewish organizations, which have “tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in budget” could do nothing to thwart him in the city with the largest Jewish community.
Those organizations’ “entire raison d’être is serving and protecting the Jewish community,” Leibovitz said. And yet, if Mamdani wins, the Jewish groups “sat around and did absolutely nothing while this Communist agitator, this inexperienced Socialist brat, basically clawed his way through the entire party structure.”
It’s “a case of gross communal leadership negligence,” he said.
If those who call themselves Jewish communal leaders had any decency, according to Leibovitz, they “would at the very least do a very real cheshbon ha’nefesh, a very real ‘accounting of the soul’—we’re a day before Yom Kippur—if not resign altogether.”
“The Jewish community ought to have seen this coming. It ought to have organized appropriately,” he told JNS. “It ought to have put its weight behind candidates that supported it, that served it well.”
Instead of doing that, Jewish organizations—Leibovitz mentioned the Jewish Community Relations Council—were all “too busy virtue signaling and showing how wonderfully progressive they are and organizing conversations with AOC and receptions with radical Democrats,” he said.
“It’s not just lunacy. Even worse, it’s incompetence,” he added. (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is known as AOC.)
Polling and the results of the Democratic primary suggest that Mamdani gained a substantial share of the Jewish vote, even as most New York Jews oppose his candidacy over his views on Israel and his failure to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
Many, including many Jewish organizations, view the latter as a call for violence against Jews.
‘They don’t see Mamdani as being disqualifying’
Henry Olsen, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told JNS that a Mamdani victory should prompt Jewish introspection about how the community approaches the ballot box.
“I think the Jewish community needs to recognize that there’s a significant number of New York Jews who simply do not share the views of the Jewish community’s leadership,” Olsen said. “They don’t see Mamdani as being disqualifying.”
“Had all of New York’s Jews voted the way Borough Park’s New York Jews did—the Orthodox Jews down in Brooklyn—then Mamdani either would have lost or it would have been an extremely close race,” Olsen said. “The fact is, they didn’t, and that’s something that the Jewish community needs to take into account.”
No polls have been released since Adams dropped out, but polling in September that asked voters whom they preferred in a three-way race suggested that Mamdani still held a double-digit lead, with Cuomo winning about 30% of the vote and Sliwa failing to crack 20%.
“Absent Curtis Sliwa dropping out of the race, it’s almost impossible to see how Mamdani can lose it, barring a scandal or an unknown position in the past that hasn’t yet been revealed,” Olsen told JNS.
Sliwa has said he won’t drop out of the race, and polls favor the 33-year-old assemblyman over the scandal-plagued former governor in a Cuomo-Mamdani match-up.
Mamdani’s platform of rent freezes, free buses, a $30 hourly minimum wage, state-run grocery stores, publicly funded medical care for transgender people and arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, should the premier come to the Big Apple, would likely make him the most left-wing mayor in New York City’s history.
That platform is popular among his young, progressive base, though enacting it may prompt a backlash among moderates and conservatives.
“There is no doubt that in the eventuality of a Mamdani victory, the city will continue to suffer horribly,” Leibovitz told JNS. “The personal safety and security of all New Yorkers, but especially Jews, will continue to deteriorate.”
Olsen said that if Mamdani wins, many New York City residents might leave for greener pastures.
“The more people feel unsafe and unwelcome and unrepresentative, the more likely they are to vote with their feet,” Olsen told JNS. “You can’t discount that from being a reaction to Mamdani, particularly if he governs from the left and if his actions have the effect on wealth-accumulation and property ownership that most people expect him to have.”
Amid the High Holidays, Mamdani and his backers have suggested that he would attempt more outreach to the Jewish community.
During Rosh Hashanah, he attended services with a progressive Jewish community in Brooklyn. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) told The New York Times that Mamdani would attend a Yom Kippur service at an Upper West Side synagogue, even as Nadler’s own congregation denied that it would host the mayoral nominee.
Leibovitz told JNS that other synagogues should follow suit in denying a place for Mamdani on Yom Kippur.
“While it is ill-advised to speak ill of anyone, but especially other Jews, the day before Yom Kippur, I will say this: Any congregation that will accept Zohran Mamdani over Yom Kippur is not a Jewish congregation,” he said. “It is that simple and that serious.”
Any synagogue that would “defile our holiest day with an appearance by a person who has rapped about the ‘Holy Land Five’—all convicted terrorist Jew-killers—who refused to denounce sentences like ‘globalize intifada’ and ‘from the river to the sea,’” he said.
“Any congregation who would allow such a man—unless, of course, he’s come to repent and promise to mend his ways—into our midst, especially on Yom Kippur, is not worthy of the title of synagogue or Jewish congregation,” he added.
