cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32367585
Opinion - Michelle Goldberg June 27, 2025
"Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian politics have sparked enormous alarm among some New York Jews, but he’s also won considerable Jewish support. In a poll of likely Jewish voters done by the Honan Strategy Group in May, Andrew Cuomo came in first, with 31 percent of the vote, but Mamdani was second, with 20 percent. On Tuesday, he won most of Park Slope, a neighborhood full of progressive Jews, and held his own on the similarly Jewish Upper West Side.
“His campaign has attracted Jewish New Yorkers of all types,” wrote Jay Michaelson, a columnist at the Jewish newspaper The Forward. The rabbi who runs my son’s Hebrew school put Mamdani on his ballot, though he didn’t rank him first. And while Mamdani undoubtedly did best among left-leaning and largely secular Jews, he made a point of reaching out to others. After he gave an interview to Der Blatt, an ultra-Orthodox Yiddish newspaper, Rabbi Moishe Indig, the leader of a faction of Hasidic Jews, told The New York Times, “As mayor, we wouldn’t have a problem with him.” (Though Indig considered adding Mamdani to his endorsement slate, he ultimately decided against it.)"
I may just be stupid, but why does the mayor of NYC’s stance on Palestine matter? What power does the mayor have to affect the situation?
Israel has devoted a lot of resources to claiming that any criticism of the state of Israel and its hasbara is anti-semitic. NYC has a famously large and active jewish diaspora. The state claiming to be the voice of all jewish people is also claiming that the man most likely to be mayor of the city with (i think) the largest jewish population in America hates jewish people because he thinks that gunning down refugees in a bread line is bad.
edit:grammar
So it just shows how Jewish people in the USA don’t align with Israel.
There’s a statically significant Jewish population in and around NYC. For reference, New York is the city with the second highest Jewish population on the planet, second only to Tel Aviv: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_city
So nothing. No power. It just showed that being pro Palestine doesn’t piss off Jewish people in the USA.
Hell, Bernie endorsed him months ago
Being Jewish doesn’t mean you’re automatically pro-genocide…
Which if you told someone 70 years ago it would need to be said, they’d think you were crazy.
