I’m an Israeli who lives in New York. Here’s why I’m voting for Mamdani
He’s shown up for my Jewish community in profoundly meaningful ways
New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander speak during the Jews For Racial And Economic Justice’s Mazals Gala on Sept. 10. Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images
On Kol Nidrei, the evening service that begins Yom Kippur, I found myself at synagogue with Zohran Mamdani.
Lab/Shul in Manhattan isn’t your typical synagogue; it’s a laboratory for belonging, where ancient liturgy meets radical inclusion. The service was led by my rabbi, Amichai Lau-Lavie — an Israeli who knows how to fill the room with both grief and hope.
Mamdani sat in the front row, with Rep. Jerry Nadler and Comptroller Brad Lander. As Lau-Lavie welcomed them to the space, Nadler and Lander were greeted with respectful applause. But when Mamdani’s name was spoken something electric ripped through the room. The applause didn’t just rise, it roared. It was long, sustained, defiant, joyful.
For me, that welcome of Mamdani — a Muslim and openly leftist candidate — on the holiest night of the Jewish year wasn’t symbolic. It was spiritual. It was the sound of a community saying: we are not afraid. And I wasn’t either. I felt safe. Seen. At home.
“My commitment is to make every New Yorker feel safe — Jews included — through policy grounded in equality, not fear,” Mamdani said earlier this year, as reported in The Guardian. That night, in the sanctuary, those words felt real.
A few days later came another night I’ll never forget — the Israelis for Peace vigil marking two years since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
Hundreds gathered — Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Arabs, Americans — huddled together on folding chairs in Union Square in chilly weather, under an open sky. As part of a wide-ranging lineup, from the stage, I read a message from Liat Atzili, whose husband Aviv was killed that day; a short, piercing story by Etgar Keret; and a poem by Mahmoud Darwish that hung in the air like a spell.
And there was Mamdani again, sitting quietly in the front row next to Lander. He didn’t take the microphone. He didn’t try to center the event on himself. He was just listening. Bearing witness.
His presence wasn’t performative. It was pastoral. In a city that so often divides its grief by identity, he crossed the invisible line and simply showed up.
That’s when it hit me: This is what safety looks like. Not fences or slogans, not solidarity-as-branding — but the radical act of standing with people in pain, without needing to own or edit it.
A recent poll showed that 43% of Jewish New Yorkers plan to support Mamdani — and among those under 44, that number climbs to 675. That data tells me what I felt that night wasn’t isolated. It’s a generational shift: younger Jews — and Israelis like me — no longer see solidarity with Palestinians as a threat, but as a responsibility.
Because despite what the right-wing Israeli government and media want us to believe, we — Jews, Israelis, people who still believe in equality — are not in danger from Zohran Mamdani because he is critical of Israel. We’re endangered, instead by the machinery of fear that tries to convince us that justice is a threat, that empathy is betrayal, that solidarity is naïve.
So let’s ask honestly: What is so terrifying about Zohran Mamdani?
That he condemns Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people?
That he grieved — publicly and unapologetically — over the catastrophe in Gaza?
That he refuses to conflate the safety of American Jews with unquestioned support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
For me, as an Israeli-American who is committed enough to Israel to fight endlessly for it to be just and equal, that’s not frightening — it’s hopeful. Having mayors and public leaders who refuse to give Kahanists or corrupt war criminals a free pass is good for us. That’s our struggle too.
As Mamdani said in a recent mayoral debate: “I would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion.”
That statement isn’t anti-Israel — it’s pro-democracy. It comes from the same moral compass that drives him to oppose Islamophobia and antisemitism alike.
Mamdani isn’t anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish. He’s pro-justice. He’s a New Yorker who believes, as I do, that no one’s safety should come at the expense of someone else’s. His campaign has pledged a large increase in anti-hate crime programming — the opposite of neglecting our safety.
The truth is, Israel’s official alliances — with would-be authoritarians like President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — have left many of us politically homeless and deeply afraid. We know that corrupt, authoritarian leaders always come for the Jews eventually and that cozying up to them has never made us safe. And in New York, the other homeland for so many Jews — including many Israelis — we have a chance to rebuild belonging on different terms: ones grounded in equality, accountability and imagination.
Amid the thunderous sanctity of Kol Nidrei and the Oct. 7 vigil’s quiet solidarity, I’ve seen the same thing: people choosing to show up for each other, even in the hardest of times.
That seems to be the city Zohran Mamdani wants to build, and it’s a city I want to live in. I think a lot of Israelis — here and back home — want that and might indeed benefit from it too.
