Mamdani tells Colbert — and a national audience — why NYC Jews shouldn’t fear him as mayor
On election day in New York City, polls show Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo in a tight race
Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral candidate, on June 23. Photo by Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images
By Jacob Kornbluh June 24, 2025
Zohran Mamdani made a final pitch for an upset in the New York mayoral race with expressions of empathy on national television for Jewish voters unnerved by antisemitism.
The Democratic Socialist challenging the establishment in the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel has been dogged for his sharp criticisms of Israel.
Appearing Monday night, the eve of the Democratic primary, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Mamdani, a Muslim, used anecdotes — the Jewish constituent afraid at home, the Jewish constituent afraid at shul — to show he gets it when it comes to Jewish fears.
The race is local but is reverberating nationally as Democrats have grappled since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks with how to keep under the tent two important constituencies: Jewish voters and younger progressives whose sympathies increasingly lean toward the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza. Also at issue are tensions between Jews and Muslims.
A group of prominent Jewish figures, spearheaded by Elisha Weisel, the son of the late Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel, had pressed Colbert to press Mamdani on recent comments, the New York Post reported, a reflection of how large the issues of antisemitism and the Gaza war have figured in the campaign.
“There are many people in New York who don’t want to support you because of the Jewish community’s fear of the true and rising antisemitism,” Colbert said. “They’re very upset by some of the things you’ve said in the past, and they’re afraid that your mayorship would actually lead to increased antisemitism; that they believe that it would be more dangerous for them. What do you say to those New Yorkers who are afraid you wouldn’t be their mayor, that you wouldn’t protect them?”
Mamdani responded with the story of a Jewish friend who felt afraid during synagogue services in the wake of the Hamas attack, which he described as a war crime, and the story of a Jewish resident in Williamsburg who now locks a door he left open for decades.
“Antisemitism is not simply something that we should talk about,” Mamdani said. “It’s something that we have to tackle. We have to make clear there’s no room for it in this city, in this country, in this world.”
Mamdani has practiced the appeal in recent weeks, including in an interview with a Yiddish-language Hasidic newspaper, as his insurgent campaign has closed in on the front-runner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Mamdani is under fire for declining to recognize Israel specifically as a Jewish state and defending the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
Colbert further pressed Mamdani on how he would reduce tensions between the city’s sizable Jewish and Muslim communities if elected New York’s first Muslim mayor. Mamdani has faced scrutiny for his unapologetically critical views of Israel and his embrace of the movement to boycott the country. Jewish voters, historically a crucial voting bloc in the Democratic primary, have tended to lean more to the right on Israel.
“New Yorkers know how to navigate disagreement,” Mamdani said, sharing another personal anecdote to highlight the shared destiny of both faiths. In 2018, while serving as campaign manager for Jewish state senate candidate Ross Barkan, Mamdani brought him to speak at a mosque in Bay Ridge. After Barkan’s speech, an older Palestinian man approached him and simply said, “Cousins.”
“I think that there is this possibility of building a shared life in our city,” Mamdani said.
Addressing his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mamdani invoked prominent Israeli voices like Holocaust historian Amos Goldberg and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, saying their criticisms of Israel’s war in Gaza have shaped his views.
Mamdani appeared on the show alongside fellow mayoral hopeful Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller and highest-ranking Jewish elected official. The two cross-endorsed each other under the ranked-choice voting system to maximize their chances against former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Lander, a liberal Zionist, highlighted his own Jewish identity to back up Mamdani.
“Look, no mayor is going to be responsible for what happens in the Middle East,” Lander said. “But there is something quite remarkable about a Jewish New Yorker and a Muslim New Yorker coming together to say, here’s how we protect all New Yorkers.”
Recent polls show that Mamdani has surged in a dead heat with Cuomo in the final stretch. An Emerson College poll of 729 voters, conducted June 18-20 for PIX11 and The Hill, projected that Mamdani would beat Cuomo by four points, 52%-48%, in the final round of the ranked-choice voting simulation.
In a final campaign rally by the Cuomo campaign on Monday, Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt of the Altneu warned of a Mamdani win, highlighting his upbringing in communist Moscow and studying in Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. “I want to ask you all to vote tomorrow like our life depends on it,” he said, “because it does.”
