Jewish business and finance sector figures told JNS they have concerns after Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City last week, warning that uncertainty around his progressive agenda could have significant financial implications for the city’s Jewish-owned and pro-Israel enterprises and real estate investors.
Mamdani, who won the mayoralty with strong first-choice voter support, ran on a platform that includes a rent freeze on stabilized apartments, construction of 200,000 subsidized homes, city-operated grocery stores, fare-free buses and a minimum wage of $30 by 2030. He has said he would pay for these programs by increasing corporate taxes and imposing an additional 2% income tax on top earners.
William Stern, founder and CEO of Cardiff, a national small-business lender, told JNS that “this win signals the end of New York City as a serious place to do business.”
“We’ve elected a man who has openly stated he doesn’t believe in billionaires, forgetting that the top 1% pay over 40 % of the city’s income tax,” said Stern, who is based in Del Mar, Calif. (Cardiff has a portfolio of $350 million in business loans in New York, the lender told JNS.)
“This is a green light for capital flight,” he said. “The financial future is one of exodus. Businesses will flee.”
According to a poll that JL Partners conducted for the Daily Mail between Oct. 23 and 26, at least 765,000 New York citizens—9% of the population—could leave the city if Mamdani was elected, and another 25%, or 2.12 million, could think of moving. (The poll of 500 registered voters had a 4.4% margin of error.)
The mayor-elect will be able to “implement an atmosphere of fear,” according to Stern.
“He has already successfully mainstreamed rhetoric that, as Rabbi Angela Buchdahl stated, ‘crosses the line clearly into antisemitism,’” Stern told JNS. “While he’ll try to get ‘free buses,’ which he can’t even do without Albany’s approval, the most immediate change he’ll deliver is an environment where Jewish New Yorkers feel unsafe and business leaders feel unwelcome.”
Although Mamdani won’t be able to “unilaterally raise income taxes,” the mayor-elect can “use his platform to amplify dangerous slogans like ‘globalize the intifada,’ which the American Jewish Committee identified as a ‘call to attack Jews,’” Stern said. “The change he’ll bring isn’t a better economy. It’s a more divided and hostile city.”
Yair Klyman, founder and managing partner of Klyman Financial in New York and a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, cautioned about market-exposure risks.
“If he’s able to raise corporate taxes, or get the state to do it, it could affect publicly traded companies headquartered here and, in turn, impact stock portfolios,” Klyman told JNS. “Property owners could also feel the effect. For instance, rent-controlled housing could see pricing pressures. These changes would mostly hit the upper middle class.”
“From a market perspective, if you hold municipal bonds and the city struggles to pass a budget because the tax base has eroded, that could stress those bonds and drive down their prices,” he said.
Rabbi Saul Berman, professor of Jewish studies at Yeshiva University and an adjunct professor and fellow of Talmudic law at Columbia Law School, told JNS that he doesn’t expect Mamdani’s win to change “the vibe at institutions.”
“The repercussions of Oct. 7 will be stronger and more felt than Mamdani’s election, partly because of the media and partly because of reality,” the rabbi and lawyer said.
“The reality is that most mayoral activities exist within the framework of broader government, and the mayor’s activities don’t appear on the front page of the New York Times daily,” he told JNS. “There are so many focal points of political and economic power in New York that are independent of the mayoralty that I don’t think he will have a significant impact on people’s professional lives.”
Berman said New York Jews will closely monitor Mamdani’s forthcoming administration.
“It will take a while for him to show whether he is competent or not and whether he will align himself with forces in the community that are supportive of anti-Jewish interests,” he said. “It will take a while for the Jewish community to watch that and determine whether it needs to bring greater political and economic pressure.”
Berman thinks that the Jewish community “has become sufficiently activated in both directions that if there were negative implications, the community would not remain silent.”
“I think there would be a very energetic response that could deter any significant negative impact,” he said.
“At this point in time, the position of the mayor is significant, but for many of us, part of our opposition to Mamdani has nothing to do with the fact that he is a Muslim or anti-Zionist,” he added, “but with the fact that his major policy plans were outside the control of the mayor.”
