After NYC primary upset, anti-Israel activist Mamdani vows not to ‘abandon my beliefs’

NEW YORK — New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, after winning a stunning upset in the city’s Democratic party mayoral primary on Tuesday night, vowed to adhere to his views on foreign affairs, while grappling with other perspectives.

Mamdani is a longtime anti-Israel activist who alarmed many Jewish New Yorkers with his rhetoric and policy promises during the caustic campaign for the mayoral primary. His leading opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, had leaned into the Jewish vote and his pro-Israel bona fides throughout the campaign. The winner of the Democratic party primary typically wins the general election for mayor.

“There are millions of New Yorkers who have strong feelings about what happens overseas. I am one of them, and I will not abandon my beliefs or my commitments grounded in a demand for equality,” Mamdani said at a raucous victory party in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City after Cuomo conceded.

“You have my word to reach further to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree and to wrestle with those disagreements,” he said.

Mamdani did not explicitly mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but has said that the plight of the Palestinians is central to his identity and the reason he got into politics. He is a longtime anti-Israel activist who set up his campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College in the 2010s and, as a state assemblyman, introduced a widely-criticized bill to strip the nonprofit status of organizations with any links to Israeli settlements and identified as an anti-Zionist. The day after the October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, Mamdani focused his criticism on Israel.

During the campaign, Mamdani refused to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; defended the phrase “globalize the intifada”; vowed to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although he would have no legal authority to do so as mayor; and repeatedly accused Israel of genocide.

During his victory speech, he did not make any other allusions to the conflict or Jewish community, but vowed to act as mayor for all of the city’s residents.

“I will be the mayor for everyone, every New Yorker, whether you voted for me or for Governor Cuomo, or felt too disillusioned by a long-broken political system to vote at all,” he said. “I cannot promise that you will always agree with me, but I will never hide from you.”

Mamdani won some Jewish support during the campaign. He won endorsements from the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace activist group and the leftist Jews for Economic and Racial Justice (JFREJ) through that group’s electoral arm, the Jewish Vote.

Sophie Ellman-Golan, a spokesperson for JFREJ, said Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian stance was one factor in his appeal and credited him with “opening up a new era in what is deemed acceptable within mainstream politics.”

Ellman-Golan credited Mamdani’s focus on affordability for his broader appeal, though, including among Jewish supporters.

“There’s a fixation on, because we are Jews, we must be primarily focused on Israel,” Ellman-Golan told The Times of Israel on Wednesday. “This is not to say these issues don’t matter to Jews, of course they do, but we are also New Yorkers and we are dealing with the same material conditions that other New Yorkers are.”

Ahead of the vote, polls showed Mamdani as the second or third-place candidate for Jewish New Yorkers. Cuomo was the favorite for Jewish New Yorkers, and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a Jewish progressive, was ranked second or third.

Lander, who identifies as a progressive Zionist, cross-endorsed Mamdani in the race. The city’s ranked-choice voting system allows voters to select up to five candidates in order of preference. The cross-endorsement means each candidate asked their supporters to rank the other in second place, boosting both campaigns. Lander won the third-most votes, according to the vote count, which tallied voters’ first-choice candidates.

Mamdani has acknowledged the problem of antisemitism in New York City, where Jews are targeted in hate crimes more than all other groups combined, vowed to represent Jewish New Yorkers, and released his own plans for combating antisemitism and hate crimes.

The winner of the Democratic party primary typically wins the general election in the mostly Democratic city that is home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. The general election is scheduled for November. Cuomo and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, both centrist supporters of Israel, have registered to run in that race as independents.

If he wins the general election, Mamdani, 33, will become the city’s first Muslim mayor.

“We are not going to let anyone divide Muslim New Yorkers and Jewish New Yorkers,” Lander said on Tuesday night.