Why I Am Supporting Zohran Mamdani
By Arthur Schwartz
Zohran Mamdani at a cat adoption event in Long Island last December. Credit: The Spirit of Lorenzo the Cat Bluesky account.
2022 was the first year I ever got election mail calling someone an antisemite. Dan Goldman and Yuh-Line Niou were running neck and neck for Congress. Goldman, a billionaire, didn’t need anyone’s money but a PAC sent out mail attacking Niou as an antisemite. She had been elected to the State Assembly in a very Jewish district. I knew Niou for years and there was not an antisemitic bone in her body. But the accusation worked. Goldman won by 1%. He never disowned the mailers or apologized.
Then came along Donald Trump, praising neo-Nazis who had chanted ”the Jews shall not replace us!” as “good people.“ He called the Jew-hating Proud Boys “patriots.” After he was re-elected, he decided to use new-found zeal against antisemitism to try to take down multiple universities, while calling the fight against racial bigotry, sex discrimination and homophobia (which he calls DEI) a blight on American history and culture. He could have attacked Columbia and Harvard as racist institutions, but he opposes DEI — except for us Jews, whose struggle against antisemitism he has adopted as his excuse for attacking academic freedom.
Antisemitism is very real. It is astounding that a group which makes up 0.03% of the world’s population (15 million out of 4.75 billion) can be so hated. And all this preaching by non-Jews like Donald Trump, Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, and billionaire Whitney Tilson (who spent millions on hate mail), about their desire to protect Jews, only makes us less safe. The more politicians rant about the need to protect Jews, the more animosity is built against us. And it doesn’t help that Israel has a wanna-be fascist as prime minister, carrying out a totally unjustified campaign of killing in Gaza, and supporting settler violence in the West Bank.
Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim born in Uganda, and naturalized in 2018, won an astounding victory on June 24. As your Democratic District Leader, I visited every polling site in the northern part of our district that day. I haven’t seen such energy and joy among voters since Obama won in 2008. And it was for Mamdani. Many of these voters were young folks. Some stood in lines for a half-hour or more. Why? Because like Obama, Mamdani had a positive message. He was hopeful, not negative. He has plans to build more affordable housing using public (not developer) money. He has a plan to address the problem of mentally ill people on our streets with a permanent corps of safety officers. He has a plan to speed up bus transportation and make it free, and to have government owned supermarkets to hold prices down. He has a “democratic socialist” platform which means he calls for free health care for all, free childcare for all, free higher education, government investment in housing, and affordable transportation. It’s not “Communism.”
I have worked with Mamdani. He doesn’t have an antisemitic bone in his body. He hates what Israel is doing in Gaza, and its treatment of Muslims inside Israel. He will have a big job to do in NYC and has no plan to take on happenings in Israel. When asked if he would visit Israel he said, “As mayor, I will be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and will be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs, whether it’s at their synagogues, homes or subway platforms.”
The day after the primary Mamdani held a news conference in Harlem to announce that the civil rights activist Maya Wiley had endorsed him. Someone wanted the candidate to prove that he was sufficiently opposed to antisemitism. “It pains me to be called an antisemite,” Mamdani said as he choked up. He has plenty of reasons to be upset. As his support grew, a $35 million campaign unfolded which basically called him a Muslim fundamentalist who poses an existential threat to this city and its Jewish residents. He was facing Islamophobia in the name of fighting antisemitism.
When asked to comment on the slogan “Globalize the intifada” Mamdani responded, “Antisemitism is a real issue in our city. It can be captured in statistics. You feel it in conversations with Jewish New Yorkers.” A Jewish man told him about being at his synagogue, hearing a door creak open behind him, and feeling terrified. Another Jewish man said had started locking a door he’d always kept open. Mamdani said he would fight antisemitism not by banning words but by increasing funding for anti-hate-crime programming by 800%.
The next day he was accused of supporting global hate against Jews. And when Eric Adams kicked off his “independent” campaign for mayor on June 26, he doubled down about how his campaign was part of the global fight against antisemitism.
In recent years, the United States has had an alarming number of antisemitic episodes, from the recent murders of two Jewish museum workers in DC, the firebombing of a vigil in Boulder, Colorado supporting the Hamas hostages, to the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. But in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, it has become increasingly difficult to separate instances of real antisemitism from politically-based accusations with little or no basis. Many of those accusations come from non-Jews who think that clothing themselves as heroes of the Jewish population makes them real heroes.
As someone who grew up just after the Holocaust, who learned that most of the world turned its back on the concentration camps, and on the Jews who escaped Europe, I felt the October 7 massacre deeply. I don’t need Adams, Cuomo or Trump to fight the prejudice which my family and I face.
The Left has to carefully separate protest against Netanyahu and his sadistic policies from support for the fascist antisemites in Hamas, Lebanon, and Iran. Mamdani has done that while wearing the bullseye of being a Muslim. His ideas are fresh and exciting, not “fringe” advances towards the People’s Republic of NYC. Embrace him, critique him. Call him out when he is wrong. But don’t call him an antisemite.
I am a Jewish man who would tend to support him and it does your argument no good to mischaracterize his refusal to condemn the phrase, “Globalize the Intifada”. Jewish people who are terrified of the mass killings of Jews in the United States rightly dismiss him for this insensitivity. I know, he parsed the meaning of the word. To Jews, we all know what it means. His defining of the word comes across as condescending arrogance. When asked why he didn’t back the Albany Holocaust Remembrance Day resolution since 2021, Mamdani downplayed the importance of Albany’s typically ceremonial resolutions. It was an easy fix. It was not important enough to him to sign even a non-binding resolution. I am against the Israeli decimation in Gaza. I believe Prime Minister Netanyahu is a war criminal. But this is where Mr. Mamdani’s Anti-Jewish reputation crosses the line from Anti Zionism to Anti-Judaism.