ADL calls for antisemitism questions as NYC mayoral candidates debate for a 2nd and final time

This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 13 days to the election.

🤺 Tonight’s debate

• The candidates will reunite for a second and final debate tonight, just days before early voting starts on Saturday.

• It’s the last chance for Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa to take the stage with Zohran Mamdani, who has held a double-digit polling lead for months.

• Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, called for the moderators to ask candidates about their approach to antisemitism. “It is vital all candidates get on the record and publicly lay out their strategy for how they will keep Jewish New Yorkers safe during this unprecedented time,” he said.

• His demand came as the ADL released a report this morning that found “hundreds of incidents of harassment, vandalism and physical violence targeting members of New York’s Jewish community” in 2025. The report did not include a number of incidents, but said they are growing in “both frequency and intensity.”

• The ADL told us they want the candidates to answer three questions: how they will ensure the safety of Jewish constituents; what message they give to Jewish New Yorkers who are anxious about rising antisemitism; and what response they give to Jews who “consider the phrase ‘globalize the intifada’ to be a call for violence against Israelis/Jews worldwide.”

• The last question targets Mamdani, who declined to condemn the protest slogan during the primary, but has since said he would “discourage” the term and acknowledged that it incited fear in some Jewish New Yorkers. Greenblatt has attacked Mamdani for his stance on Israel and previously said the candidate would not condemn the phrase because “he believes it.”

• You can catch the debate live at 7 p.m. Eastern time on Spectrum News NY1 and WNYC radio. There will also be a livestream on YouTube. In the first debate last week, antisemitism and Israel figured prominently.

💰 Following the money

• Neighborhoods with large Jewish communities funneled money into Cuomo’s campaign over the two days after incumbent Mayor Eric Adams quit the race, according to a POLITICO analysis of campaign contributions.

• Cuomo’s largest concentration of donors came from a ZIP code covering Gravesend in Brooklyn, with more than 90 individual donors, followed by Midwood with more than 80 donors, the data showed.

• Gravesend and Midwood are both home to dense Jewish populations. Some may have rallied around Cuomo as he became the principal competitor to Mamdani, whose views on Israel alienated many older, Orthodox and more moderate or conservative Jews.

• Gravesend is the epicenter of a movement to get Syrian Jews to vote, which has included requirements for voter registration to enroll in yeshivas or attend synagogue.

• Many voters in the area supported President Donald Trump in 2024 and are Sephardic Jews with roots in Syria or originate from the former Soviet Union, which could influence their views of Mamdani as a democratic socialist.

• Cuomo also received contributions from nearly 200 people across three ZIP codes on the Upper East Side and 175 people in two Upper West Side ZIP codes.

🏆 Endorsement tracker

• Rep. Dan Goldman, a Jewish Democrat who represents swaths of Manhattan and Brooklyn, said on Tuesday that he was “not ready” to endorse Mamdani as Election Day approaches.

• Asked by CNN’s Kasie Hunt if he was going to vote for Mamdani, Goldman said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, to be honest.”

• Goldman elaborated, “I am very concerned about some of the rhetoric coming from Zohran Mamdani, and I can tell you as a Jew in New York, who was in Israel on Oct. 7, I and many other people are legitimately scared because there has been violence in the name of anti-Israel and anti-Zionism. And I’ve asked him to speak out on that and to condemn that and I frankly haven’t really seen him do much on that.”

• In August, Goldman said he had a “good conversation” with Mamdani but would not endorse the party nominee until he took “concrete steps” to assuage the fears of Jewish New Yorkers.

• Meanwhile, Rabbi Michael S. Miller, the longtime head of New York’s Jewish Community Relations Council, has backed Cuomo in his first political endorsement, joining multiple rabbis in departing from their past practices to weigh in.

• Miller cited Mamdani’s Israel views, saying the frontrunner “would put at risk the residents of the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.”

💼 Cuomo says he would give Sliwa a job

• Cuomo suggested he would give Sliwa a job in his mayoral administration if the Republican nominee dropped out to help him beat Mamdani, when asked by the Jewish conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg yesterday.

• “That would be something that I would be interested in. We need a coalition to run this city. We need New Yorkers to come together,” Cuomo told Rosenberg.

• It’s the kind of scenario that attendees at a synagogue meeting on Sunday pitched to Sliwa in an effort to convince him to exit the race. Sliwa rebuffed them and remains defiant against mounting pressure from Cuomo and anti-Mamdani New Yorkers. “Let’s be very clear: I am not dropping out, under no circumstances,” he said at a press conference on the Upper West Side on Tuesday. “I’ve already been offered money to drop out. I said, ‘No.’”

🕌 Mamdani attacked over imam meeting

• Cuomo and Sliwa are attacking Mamdani over his recent photo of a meeting with Siraj Wahhaj, a well-known imam in Brooklyn.

• The New York Post covered Wahhaj’s opposition to homosexuality and his characterization as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though Wahhaj was never charged and the list he appeared on was criticized as overly broad.

• Political experts told Jewish Insider that the backlash to Mamdani’s meeting with Wahhaj is unlikely to influence the election amid a generational shift. “Dead cops and firefighters don’t seem to matter much these days,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant who leads an anti-Mamdani super PAC.

• Mamdani has said the criticism is discriminatory. “The same imam met with Mayor Bloomberg, met with Mayor De Blasio, campaigned alongside Eric Adams, and the only time it became an issue of national attention was when I met with him because of the fact of my faith and because I’m on the precipice of winning this election,” he told reporters, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.