This piece first ran as part of the New York Jewish Week’s daily newsletter, rounding up the latest on politics, culture, food and what’s new with Jews in the city. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
🕎 Hanukkah with Patinkin
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Zohran Mamdani was welcomed to a Hanukkah celebration at the home of Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin, his wife, actress Kathryn Grody, and their son Gideon.
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The mayor-elect helped prepare latkes using the recipe in “,” lit the first candle and listened to the blessings in a video he shared on X. “Your mayoral tenure has now been blessed,” Patinkin said to Mamdani.
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Patinkin and Grody align with Mamdani’s condemnations of Israel and previously supported his campaign.
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Mamdani also attended a Hanukkah celebration hosted by the New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal organization, last week in Manhattan.
🏆 Mamdani’s victory lap
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Mamdani will celebrate his inauguration on New Year’s Day with a party spanning seven blocks of Broadway. The block party will have room for 40,000 guests, on top of 4,000 tickets for the 1 p.m. swearing-in at City Hall.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish forefather of Mamdani’s progressive movement, will swear him in.
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One person who won’t be there is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was invited by Jewish Republican City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, reported the New York Post. Mamdani has vowed to arrest Netanyahu if he visits New York.
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“Even though I won’t be able to make it on that day, I assure that I will visit New York soon,” said a letter from Netanyahu, hinting at a future showdown with Mamdani.
🔎 New vetting after antisemitic posts scandal
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Mamdani said he is updating the vetting process for his transition team after a top hire resigned over past antisemitic online posts.
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“There are clear changes that need to be made and that’s exactly what we’re doing right now,” Mamdani told reporters in Staten Island on Friday. “I was not aware of these posts, and I would not have hired her.”
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His team also announced it hired an independent firm to support vetting, according to City and State.
🗞 In other news
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A federal judge in Brooklyn has allowed a lawsuit by the Hasidic sex-abuse whistleblower Sam Kellner to proceed. Read about his claim that prosecutors helped engineer his arrest to benefit a convicted child molester.
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A weekly meet-up in Manhattan for Jews who fled the Nazis has ended after 82 years. The decision was made after Marion House, the last member who remembered life under the Nazis, died at 102.
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Emily Korzenik, one of the first women ordained as rabbis in the United States and the officiator of a contentious 1985 bar mitzvah in Poland, died on Dec. 15 at her home in Scarsdale.
👋 Stefanik drops out
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New York Rep. Elise Stefanik ended her campaign for governor and said she would not seek reelection to her upstate House seat on Friday.
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The Republican won national fame for grilling Ivy League university presidents about antisemitism on their campuses, adding fuel to a pressure campaign that caused some to resign.
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Stefanik’s departure from the race followed the entrance of Jewish Republican Bruce Blakeman, another Trump ally who won the president’s endorsement the day after she dropped out.
