“It seems like a lot of the anti-Mamdani moms I’ve seen tend to be those ‘liberal New Yorkers’ who are privately Republican,” a mother at a prestigious uptown private school told me prior to the election. “I overheard two moms talking outside of school, and one remarked angrily that ‘if Mamdani wins, it will be the end of Western civilization.’” Some have gone full-on radicalized QAnon conspiracy theorist, with at least one well-educated Jewish mother, I was told, asking questions like, “Will we have to start praying five times a day now that Mamdani is mayor?”
The rumor mill is circulating a story about kids asking if their family will be sent back to Poland because of Mamdani’s victory. (The only families in New York City currently being deported—that we know of—are those of undocumented immigrants, some of whom are being detained by ICE agents in front of and alongside their very young children. The Gaza Strip currently appears to be the most unsafe place in the world to be a child—4 out of every 100 children have lost one or both parents.)
After the election, Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, the senior rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun—the Orthodox synagogue Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended before they left the city for Washington, DC—addressed a letter to New York’s Jews about the atmosphere in New York City. “It’s beginning to feel like the 1930s,” he wrote, referring to the period in Europe when the Nazi Party began targeting Jews with discriminatory laws, economic sanctions, and social-isolation policies.
Not everyone is buying the historical comparison. Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, made a video in which he responded to Rabbi Steinmetz’s claim, saying it was “baffling” that Jews “would feel this level of terror just because Mamdani believes that Israel should be a state in which Palestinians and Jews are treated equally.”
One New York City private school mom who voted for Cuomo and is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors explained how the fear of Mamdani is driven by the twin engines of intergenerational trauma and rising anti-Israel rhetoric. “I know quite a few Jewish parents who are afraid of Mamdani and truly think he is deeply antisemitic and a threat to Jewish existence. I don’t believe that, but I do believe that his being our mayor validates and tacitly enables others with antisemitic beliefs to express or act on those beliefs,” she said. “Growing up on the Upper West Side, the Holocaust and antisemitism felt mostly like a history lesson. I was surprised to find myself unnerved by the anti-Jewish rhetoric from the left following October 7 and Israel’s attacks on Gaza.”
Other Jews in the same affluent social circles view the legacy of October 7 much differently. A 30-something lawyer who identifies as a Zionist and has three children, one of whom attends a Jewish preschool, told me, “October 7 has given us [Jews] permission to run wild with our fears.” (The Zionist lawyer voted for Mamdani and asked to be quoted anonymously for fear of professional and social backlash.)
Arno Rosenfeld, who writes the “Antisemitism Decoded” newsletter for the Jewish outlet The Forward, recently praised the new mayor—and his political instincts. “Mamdani, who became a fixation for many Jewish leaders during the race for mayor, has been remarkably conciliatory to the Jewish establishment, modeling a version of anti-Zionism that mostly avoids some of the pitfalls I’ve outlined,” he wrote.
But not everyone’s views are fixed. In a sermon two and a half weeks before the election, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue told his congregation that Mamdani “poses a danger to the New York Jewish community.” In December, while giving a speech at the biennial assembly of the American Zionist Movement, Cosgrove criticized that same community, saying that defenders of Israel shouldn’t be surprised that Mamdani was supported by some 33% of Jewish New Yorkers, and called for a “new chapter of American Zionism” that balances support for Israel with acknowledgment of and empathy for Palestinian suffering.
