I don’t want to write about Zohran Mamdani. I’d rather write about almost anything else. I dislike the man as much as one can dislike a public figure. But you can’t run a publication about the world we actually live in and pretend the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel isn’t spending his political capital singling out the world’s only Jewish state while the Jewish community in his own backyard pays the price for it.
Jews make up roughly 10% of New York’s population and are the victims of well over half of the city’s confirmed hate crimes. In the first half of 2026, 178 of the city’s confirmed hate crimes targeted Jews
New Yorkers didn’t elect Mamdani, a Shia Muslim, because they read his platform and believed in democratic socialism as a governing philosophy. They elected him because high rent is hurting people, because the subway feels like a gamble, because groceries cost what a used car used to cost, and because he promised, loudly and specifically, that he would fix it. Free buses. Frozen rent. City-run grocery stores.
“Free, free, free, free, free” — everything was going to be free. Something he was never going to be able to deliver in full, and largely hasn’t.
What New Yorkers are getting instead is a mayor who has spent an outsized share of his first year in office relitigating a war seven thousand miles away, while the city’s Jewish community absorbs the fallout of his deliberate actions to single out one country.
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