Miss Israel says Mamdani’s wife shunned her at NYC café
Melanie Shiraz says Rama Duwaji dismissed her after finding out she’s Israeli during chance meeting, posts clip of interaction
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Israel’s contestant in the Miss Universe pageant, Melanie Shiraz, said on Wednesday that she had met Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, by chance in a US coffee shop.
Duwaji has a history of extremist social media activity opposing Israel and is a frequent critic of the Jewish state.
Shiraz said in a social media post that Duwaji sat next to her at a cafe in New York City, and that Duwaji was willing to take a photo together, “until she found out that I was Miss Israel.”
Shiraz posts a brief clip of herself with Duwaji, who smiles, then looks at Shiraz, appearing to try to exit the frame. The video does not include any dialogue.
Duwaji apologized last month for social media posts she made as a teenager, some of which included anti-gay and anti-Black slurs.
In the old posts, she had also shared images praising female Palestinian terrorists who participated in plane hijackings and bombings in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015, she shared a post in which someone else wrote that Tel Aviv was occupied Palestinian land and “shouldn’t exist.”
Her apology did not specifically mention her posts about Israel, which included, more recently, “liking” a post that celebrated the October 2023 Hamas onslaught.
Duwaji also provided an illustration for an essay by an author who described the October 7 attack as “spectacular,” called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls,” and has attacked Jewish Americans.
“I told her that, as an Israeli, I was disappointed in seeing the kind of rhetoric that she was promoting online, but I told her that part of my ideology as an Israeli is to have productive dialogue in which one side is not constantly dehumanized,” Shiraz said. “Despite the setting being calm, the moment she found out I was Israeli, she refused to have a conversation.”
“If you can publicly apologize for dehumanizing Israelis but you can’t actually get yourself to humanize one when you come face to face with them in real life, what does that say about you?” Shiraz said. “What does that say about the state of our politics, considering that that is the wife of the mayor of New York City?”
There was no immediate comment from Duwaji or City Hall.
Mamdani has previously defended his wife as a “private person” who does not hold a formal position at City Hall, although Duwaji maintains a high profile.
Agencies contributed to this report.
The Times of Israel Community.