‘Jews for Zohran’ knock doors as Mamdani’s past IDF comments resurface

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 6 days to the election.

✡️ ‘Jews for Zohran, including rabbis and Mandy Patinkin

• Jewish New Yorkers who support Zohran Mamdani are pushing back on the narrative that he threatens their safety, with dozens canvassing on the heavily Jewish Upper West Side over the weekend.

• Andrew Cuomo has centered the accusation that Mamdani would endanger Jews in his closing pitch to voters. But a group of canvassers wearing “New York Jews for Zohran” T-shirts said that Cuomo misunderstood the city’s Jewish population, according to The New York Times.

• Cuomo was “flattening” Jews, said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, a progressive anti-Zionist organization that has endorsed Mamdani. “He is talking about the Jewish community as though we have one political opinion and one voice. And that’s simply not true,” said Miller.

• Another JVP organizer, Eliza Klein, said the group aimed to show that Mamdani had “not fringe but mass Jewish support.” Recent polling indicates that Cuomo leads Mamdani with Jewish voters, though his margin has varied from 4% to 31% in different surveys.

• Cuomo has escalated his accusations against Mamdani in recent weeks. Last week, he described Mamdani’s “arrogance and antisemitism” at a synagogue event. He also told The Forward that concerns about Mamdani among Jews were “frighteningly high,” making them “more motivated than I have ever seen them in politics.”

• The “New York Jews for Zohran” are up against a chorus of prominent Jewish New Yorkers urging mobilization against Mamdani, along with more than 1,000 rabbis nationwide.

• In an ad shared Tuesday by the progressive group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a group of women rabbis said they were “among the thousands of Jewish New Yorkers who’ve been out door-knocking and phone-banking to elect Zohran Mamdani.”

• Famed Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin and his wife, actress Kathryn Grody, also backed Mamdani in a video with him released on Tuesday. Patinkin called Mamdani “an extraordinary human being” who would “lead our city and eventually, if we’re really thinking, our nation and the world to a better, safer, all-inclusive existence.” The couple previously condemned Israel’s war in Gaza and decried Jewish people who “allow this to happen.”

🚓 Mamdani’s comments about the NYPD and IDF resurface

• Mamdani is being criticized over comments he made during a 2023 Democratic Socialists of America panel in which he attributed police brutality in the United States to the Israeli army.

• “For anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local,” Mamdani, then as now a state legislator, said in the comments, which resurfaced in a clip this week. “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

• The comment appeared to channel anti-Zionist activists’ longstanding criticism of delegations of U.S. police officers who train with Israeli police and military services. The critics — including Jewish Voice for Peace, which published a 2018 report calling the trips a “Deadly Exchange” — say the delegations serve to import brutal policing techniques. Defenders of the delegations say the idea that Israel is responsible for police brutality in the United States represents an antisemitic canard that overlooks a history long predating Israel.

• Amid the controversy, Politico’s Jeff Coltin asked Mamdani if he would maintain the NYPD’s office in Israel yesterday. Mamdani replied, “My focus is here on the NYPD office in New York City. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

• The clip joins another past comment in which Mamdani tied the IDF to local experiences in New York City. On a 2016 podcast, he recalled that an Israeli teacher he had in high school was “a graduate of the IDF” and thus “had tailed brown guys for a long time.”

📬 Lining up to vote

• Our reporter Grace Gilson talked to voters in a heavily Sephardic Jewish neighborhood of South Brooklyn on Tuesday night. They lined up at a poll site that has been seeing one of the highest turnouts in the borough, according to local officials.

• One 28-year-old Orthodox voter from Gravesend said he cast his ballot for Cuomo, adding that his top priority was “safety” and opposing “defunding the police.” He believed that Republican Curtis Sliwa didn’t have enough experience, while Mamdani was “ignorant” and “wouldn’t even condemn the globalizing of intifada, which is ridiculous.”

• The polling site was in a neighborhood where schools and synagogues have said they were requiring proof of voter registration to participate.

• Shannon, a 45-year-old Modern Orthodox voter, said she also voted for Cuomo even though Sliwa was her preferred candidate. “We love Sliwa, but we know a vote for Sliwa is a vote for Mamdani because we learned that he has no chance,” she said. She believed that Mamdani supported “genocide” and turning New York into an “Islamic regime.”

• Shannon said her community pushed strongly to get out the vote. “Schools made sure everyone was registered to vote, everyone was on top of everyone, our shul, to make sure, especially now that it is so critical,” she said.

📊 Numbers to know

• Mamdani continues to lead the race in a new poll from the Manhattan Institute, which showed him winning 46% of the vote, followed by 31% for Cuomo, 21% for Sliwa and 8% still undecided.

• The conservative-leaning think tank surveyed 600 likely New York City voters and had an error margin of 4%.

• The Manhattan Institute predicted that Cuomo would beat Mamdani by 13 points one week before the Democratic primary, which Mamdani won by over 7 points.

📚 The antisemitism curriculum that Mamdani supports

• Mamdani announced during the last mayoral debate that he would implement “Hidden Voices,” a school program that teaches New York City students about Jewish American history. (The curriculum became available to schools this year.)

• “Hidden Voices” uses different language about Israel and Zionism than Mamdani, according to a review by The Forward.

• The program defines Zionism as “the right to Jewish national self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” Mamdani has said that he is “not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.” He supports the right of Israel to exist not as a Jewish state, but as a state “with equal rights for all.”

🏆 Endorsement tracker

• Former New York Gov. David Paterson endorsed Cuomo yesterday. He backed Cuomo in the primary, then switched to incumbent Mayor Eric Adams in the general election — and now he is back on Cuomo’s side. Adams dropped out last month and has also endorsed Cuomo.

• Sliwa said to Politico that Paterson was “the kiss of death politically.” Paterson is married to one of Sliwa’s ex-wives and a stepfather to Sliwa’s son — but not the Jewish ones.