Like so many other New Yorkers, Samantha Epstein-Rubenstein was distressed when Zohran Mamdani won the city’s Democratic mayoral primary last month. As a lifelong supporter of Israel, she knows she doesn’t want to vote for Mamdani in November — but she’s also not sure who to support instead.
So Epstein-Rubenstein turned to WhatsApp, where she activated a dormant group she initiated two years ago to educate voters and marshal support for her local City Council candidate, Julie Menin. Ahead of the June primary elections, she and another Upper East Side Jewish local urged the roughly 250 members of the group to invite every Jew across the five boroughs who was eligible to vote they knew to join, with the goal of building some kind of unified strategy to keep Mamdani out of office.
By election day, Epstein-Rubenstein and her partner, a businessman who declined to be interviewed, had attracted 700 people to the group, called Jews of NYC – Get Out the Vote. The roster included neighbors, synagogue friends and parents of Jewish day school students — all recruited very deliberately.
After Mamdani’s surprise primary win, the group snowballed in size, soon reaching WhatsApp’s maximum of 1,024 members. A second group also quickly reached the limit. They launched a third, watching it fill via word of mouth as anxiety about Mamdani’s candidacy ratcheted up among pro-Israel Jews in the city.
For now, the group’s aim is a broad but simple one: “How do you connect to as many Jewish communities in the five boroughs as possible and commit to standing together?” Epstein-Rubenstein told the New York Jewish Week in a phone interview last week.
“I hope that we can translate this into boots on the ground, how to really get the vote out, how to mobilize our base,” she added. “And I don’t know yet what that looks like.”
Such is the conundrum facing pro-Israel voters in New York City’s mayoral election this year. Many are deeply concerned about Mamdani’s comments on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, his support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
But they don’t see a single obvious alternative on the ballot. Mayor Eric Adams is running as an independent — in part because he faced multiple corruption charges that the Trump administration dismissed, in a deal that is widely understood to have involved Adams agreeing to enforce Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda in the city. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned amid scandal and came in second to Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary, will also be on the ballot — but he hasn’t committed to a full campaign. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa has run multiple times before and never carved out more than a fraction of the vote.
Some are hoping for a new, more desirable write-in candidate to emerge — a long shot at this stage of election season. Many are willing to settle for a second-best but worry that Adams and Cuomo will split the moderate vote.
Epstein-Rubenstein, a Modern Orthodox mother of three, sees her WhatsApp groups as a tool to build Jewish consensus around a single alternative to Mamdani. Who that should be, she isn’t sure.
“I would say that our current mayor has been an incredibly good friend, and Gov. Cuomo has always been a very good friend,” said Epstein-Rubenstein, who is the founder and chief business development officer of WareSpace, which provides warehouse spaces for small businesses.
Morgan Raum, a 28-year-old content creator who runs Shabbat Club, an independent Shabbat dinner party club, was added to Jews of NYC – Get Out the Vote by a friend.
“I obviously joined the group, because I do not support Zohran personally,” she said.
As an independent voter, Raum thinks she may vote for Adams in November. “But in practice, I don’t know if I support him as a candidate,” she said. “And I think I’ll know better at the time of the election.”
What gets in the way, she said, is that Adams’ views and hers don’t align — neither do those of any of the major candidates. Raum added that the corruption charges that were leveled against Adams, and later dropped, are also of concern.
“By the time of the election I am hoping their policies and values will be more clear,” she said.
Raum hopes the WhatsApp group will help illuminate that decision. “But we obviously need a candidate to rally behind,” she said.
The members of the fledgling group are hardly the only New Yorkers who are worried about Mamdani but uncertain about what to do next.
On Monday, former New York Gov. David Paterson gathered together a group of “New York political leaders and stakeholders” in Midtown. In his remarks, Paterson called for “strategic unity” — and asked either Cuomo or Adams to drop out of the race in order to prevent a split vote.
“This is, today, the beginning of a process,” Paterson said. “It is publicizing our wish to try to find the right candidate for the people of the city of New York. We’ll have more later on.”
For Epstein-Rubenstein, that “right candidate” is “someone who is unapologetically standing next to the Jewish community that is so, so large and has so much history and so much part of the fabric of what makes New York, New York,” she said.
A key component, she added, is someone who “understands that we are one in the sense that our hearts encompass both the United States and Israel, and our children — many of them who will go and spend gap years in Israel, and some who might even go on to live in Israel.”
For now, as many elements of November’s election remain uncertain, Rubenstein is focused on getting as many pro-Israel Jews added to her WhatsApp group as possible.
“It is meant to be something that connects us,” Rubenstein said. “And then, once we get closer to the November election, and the dust has settled, and we have guidance, and we know this is the one candidate that we can all commit to voting for … [we can] really hopefully [start] turning out the Jewish vote in that way.”
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