Mamdani ad promoting Rent Guidelines Board features city employee wearing a keffiyeh

A version of 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.

🪧 Diners at Israeli restaurant harassed by protesters

• Pro-Palestinian protesters shouted “Bomb Israel” and called customers “pedophiles” earlier this month outside Motek, an Israeli eatery in Flatiron, reports The New York Post.

• Video circulating on social media showed the demonstrators wearing keffiyehs and shouting at diners sitting outside the restaurant. Some of them yelled “The Epstein class” and “You f—king pedophiles.”

• The protesters appeared to be organized by Within Our Lifetime, a hardline pro-Palestinian group that has sparked controversy for using aggressive tactics and asserting support for Hamas.

• Meanwhile, NYC’s food industry continues to reckon with turmoil over Israeli products and antisemitic rhetoric. At a community meeting of the Park Slope Food Coop on Tuesday, a discussion about boycotting Israeli goods was interrupted by a member saying that “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country,” according to The New York Post.

🚪 Mamdani employee wears keffiyeh in video on rent guidelines

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani promoted his Rent Guidelines Board initiative in a video on Wednesday — but his advocacy for the Palestinian cause also made an appearance.

• The clip featured two of Mamdani’s employees with the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, director Tascha Van Aucken and Queens deputy borough director Mohamed Alharbi, knocking on the mayor’s door to promote his push for tenant and property owner hearings.

• Alharbi, whose family comes from Yemen and who worked on Mamdani’s mayoral campaign doing outreach to Muslim and South Asian voters, wears a keffiyeh throughout the video.

• Keffiyehs are traditional Palestinian headscarves that have become symbols of pro-Palestinian advocacy. Some Jews say they have come to see garment as an unmistakable sign of the wearer’s antipathy toward Israel and anyone with an attachment to it — attitudes that have accompanied a spike in antisemitic incidents in recent years.

• Mamdani’s anti-Zionist stance and support for pro-Palestinian protesters have been the source of ongoing tensions between him and Jewish leaders in the city before and since his election last year. Last week, he vetoed legislation that would have limited protests near educational institutions, saying the bill would have infringed on free speech rights, including for pro-Palestinian protesters.

📃 NY, NJ reps lead resolution condemning Hasan Piker, Candace Owens for antisemitism

• New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler and New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer introduced a House resolution on Wednesday denouncing the leftist streamer Hasan Piker and the far-right podcaster Candace Owens for spreading antisemitism.

• The bipartisan resolution, which outlined statements from Piker and Owens, condemned “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content disseminated by prominent online personalities” and urged “social media platforms and public leaders to denounce and address such conduct.”

• Piker told our Andrew Lapin that the lawmakers were “making antisemitism worse” by “conflating legitimate critics of Israel with actual antisemites.” He has recently made inroads with prominent Democrats, even as his rhetoric — including the statement that “Hamas is 1,000 times better” than Israel — has concerned many Jews.

• Owens, a leading anti-Israel figure on the right, has pushed theories that Israel was behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk along with promoting broader negative commentary about Judaism and Jewish figures.

🔎 Who does Menin need to override Mamdani’s ‘buffer zone’ veto?

• Carl Wilson, the NYC Council’s expected newest member who won a special election on Tuesday, said on Wednesday that he would vote to override Mamdani’s veto of a “buffer zone” bill limiting protests around educational facilities. The statement came after his spokesperson seemed to soften his support for an override on Tuesday.

• But City Council Speaker Julie Menin would still need three more votes to pass the bill, which emerged from concerns among Jewish New Yorkers about pro-Palestinian demonstrations outside synagogues and schools.

• The lawmaker who could be most open to supporting an override, Democrat Gale Brewer from the Upper West Side, abstained from voting last month even though she co-sponsored the bill. But she told Politico on Wednesday that she remains torn, and she is skeptical that Menin could achieve an override even with Wilson’s help.

📚 Jewish Theological Seminary names Mike Uram as chancellor

• Rabbi Mike Uram has been named the next chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Conservative Judaism’s flagship university and rabbinical school. Uram, who does not have a PhD, did not grow up in the Conservative movement and has not served in a long-term congregational pulpit, told our Andrew Silow-Carroll that his novel background is his strength.

🥯 Jack Schlossberg’s favorite restaurant is Barney Greengrass

• Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s half-Jewish grandson who is running to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler in a heavily Jewish Manhattan district, told West Side Rag that his family’s celebration spot is Barney Greengrass.

• “There’s literally no better food in the entire world than Barney Greengrass,” Schlossberg said of the storied Jewish deli on the Upper West Side.

• Schlossberg also identified the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s influence on elections as one of the first issues he would tackle in Congress. “Billionaires made up 20% of spending on election costs in 2024,” he said. “The Super PACs, Corporate PACs, AIPAC, taking money from big tech, it’s all part of the integrity pledge that I have made as a candidate.”