Eric Adams-linked socialite: ‘My dear Jewish family … Mamdani taking over the city your fault’

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 74 days to the election.

🐝 Social media buzz

• Alisa Roever, a New York socialite with ties to Mayor Eric Adams, posted a message that appeared to blame Jews for Mamdani’s primary win on Thursday.

• “My dear Jewish family,” she said on her social media pages. “Stop calling me and complaining. NYC the largest Jewish after Israel! Jews own real estate, banks, media. Mamdani taking over the city your fault. It is slap in your face that you are not strong anymore Get together and get the city back!” Roever co-founded the charity Angels Helpers with Adams’ brother, Bernard.

• This may be the least of the mayor’s problems. Adding to a swirl of criminal cases, corruption charges were launched against several of his associates and supporters on Thursday. And don’t forget that his ally Winnie Greco handed a CITY reporter a potato chip bag stuffed with cash this week. The New York Times has since reported that was not an isolated incident, spotting other envelopes of cash handed out at Adams’ rallies.

• Cuomo jokingly had potato chips handed out to reporters at a press conference on Thursday, saying, “Sometimes a bag of potato chips is just a bag of potato chips.” Of course, he made sure to post the video on X as part of his social media rebrand.

🚨 Fact-check update

• After we fact-checked what Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said about Mamdani on CNBC, host Andrew Ross Sorkin issued his own clarification on air.

• Greenblatt “made a point of saying that Zohran Mamdani had not met with any mainstream Jewish institutions,” said Sorkin, who is Jewish. “The truth is, and I didn’t know this in the moment, but he had actually visited a whole number of synagogues.”

• The ADL told us Greenblatt meant that Mamdani did not visit any Jewish organizations after the primary. He gave Sorkin the same explanation, though the host noted accurately that no “time element” was mentioned on air. He added, “I don’t know about the extent of all of this, and by the way, I would welcome Zohran Mamdani to come on this airwave.”

🔭 The view from New York City

• We covered the triumph of Omar Fateh, a young democratic socialist who has drawn comparisons to Mamdani, in his bid to unseat Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Fateh won the endorsement of Minnesota’s Democratic party in July.

• But yesterday, party officials revoked the endorsement. They cited “substantial failures” at the chaotic convention, which saw technological and procedural issues.

• Fateh’s campaign said the unusual move of stripping an endorsement represented the “disenfranchisement of thousands of Minneapolis caucus-goers and the delegates who represented all of us on convention day.”

• Frey, who is Jewish, said he was “proud to be a member of a party that believes in correcting our mistakes.”