Many Jewish voters back Mamdani. And many agree with him on Gaza.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Aug 5
- 4 min read
By Liam Stack
Ben Sadoff knocked on roughly 1,000 doors as a canvasser for state Assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary campaign in New York City, and the voters he met brought up the same issues again and again: the cost of rent, the cost of child care and the sense that things in the city were going in the wrong direction.
One thing they did not frequently mention was Israel, he said. And when voters — including Jewish ones — did bring it up, their comments often focused on their anguish over Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, where starvation is spreading and about 60,000 people have been killed, according to officials in Gaza.
“I think this campaign has really shown us something we have known for a while,” said Sadoff, who is Jewish and works as a bike mechanic in Manhattan. “There are a million Jewish New Yorkers who have wide-ranging opinions on all kinds of issues.”
Mamdani’s commanding victory in the Democratic primary for mayor alarmed many Jews who are concerned by his outspoken criticism of Israel. But he won the votes of many other Jewish New Yorkers, some of whom said in interviews that they were unbothered by that criticism and inspired by his intense focus on affordability. Often these voters said that Mamdani’s views on Israel, and his vocal opposition to its treatment of Palestinians, echoed their own.
Mamdani has criticized Israel in ways that were once unthinkable for an elected official in New York, home to America’s largest Jewish population. He has decried Israel as an apartheid state. He has said it should ensure equal rights for followers of all religions instead of favoring Jews in its political and legal system. He has supported the movement that seeks to economically isolate it, known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.
And he has endorsed the view of Israel’s leading human rights organizations and of genocide scholars — including some in Israel — that it is committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation the Israeli government has denied.
Mamdani’s positions on Israel have alienated him from Zionist Jewish groups, many of which have accused him of being antisemitic, a charge that he denies. His views also became a line of attack for some of his primary rivals, including former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running in the general election as an independent.
Steve Israel, a former Democratic member of Congress who represented parts of Long Island and Queens, said that Mamdani’s primary victory was “‘Twilight Zone’ stuff” for some Jewish New Yorkers.
“Mamdani’s positions on Israel up to now are way out of the mainstream of the Jewish community, and the irony here is that his progressive policies on economic issues would have at least a plurality of support by Jewish voters,” he said. “But the toxicity of his positions on Israel have just become impossible for those same voters to forgive.”
Yet none of Mamdani’s stances kept him from winning a decisive primary victory over Cuomo, his closest competitor.
It is difficult to determine how many Jewish voters supported Mamdani because even in New York, the Jewish population is too small to be measured with precision by most polls. Neighborhoods with large numbers of Orthodox Jewish residents voted overwhelmingly for Cuomo. He also won other heavily Jewish areas such as Riverdale in the Bronx, though outside of Orthodox neighborhoods, the Jewish population is generally not concentrated enough to allow analysis using precinct-level vote data.
But Mamdani enjoyed a broad victory that suggests at least some backing from many different constituencies, and preelection polls, which generally undercounted support for him, showed him earning double-digit support among Jewish voters.
Data from the ranked choice voting process also shows that Mamdani was selected as an alternate choice by two-thirds of voters whose top choice was Brad Lander, the city comptroller and the highest-ranking Jewish official in city government, who made his identity a key part of his campaign and who cross-endorsed Mamdani during the primary.
Jeffrey Lerner, Mamdani’s communications director and one of his many Jewish advisers, said in a statement that it was “no surprise that thousands of Jewish New Yorkers proudly cast their ballots for Zohran in the June primary, despite relentless fearmongering from Republicans and the billionaire class.”
In recent comments at the Hampton Synagogue in Westhampton Beach, New York, Cuomo attributed Mamdani’s victory to both a surge of support from younger voters and a shift in the way younger people think about Israel and antisemitism.
Cuomo, who has made unflinching support of Israel part of his political brand, joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team after the International Criminal Court accused him of war crimes and issued an arrest warrant for him last year.
In his remarks, Cuomo asserted that more than half of Jewish primary voters had cast their ballots for Mamdani, though he did not back up that claim. He appealed to the synagogue’s well-heeled and mostly older congregants for their help.
“With those young people, the under-30 people, they are pro-Palestinian and they don’t consider it being anti-Israel,” Cuomo said, according to a recording posted online by The Forward, a Jewish news organization.
“Being anti-Israel to them means anti-Bibi’s policies, anti-Israel government policies,” he added, referring to Netanyahu by a common nickname. “And they are, and they were, highly motivated, and they came out to vote.”
Though Mamdani did drive up turnout among younger voters, his supporters come from a range of age groups, many of whom share his belief that you can criticize Israel while still supporting Jewish New Yorkers.
Lisa Cowan, 57, a philanthropy executive in Prospect Heights who is Jewish, ranked Mamdani second on her ballot, after Lander.
She praised Mamdani’s focus on affordability and the “positive spirit” he had brought to the campaign. His comments on Israel did not bother her, she said, because he struck her as “a nuanced thinker” and “someone who loved New York and loved New Yorkers.”
Mamdani has said that fighting antisemitism would be a priority for him as mayor, and has promised to increase funding to fight hate crimes in New York by 800%.