What a day it is. The joy that emanates from last night’s foreseeable blue wave, and its promise of a coming 2026 blue tsunami, is a much needed boost for hope. Our hope.
I see it from the national perspective: California passing Prop 50 by huge numbers, in an election with no names on the ballot, proves ideas still mobilize people to vote.
Virginia, birthplace of our nation, turning full blue with its first woman governor. New Jersey mirroring the same energy. Smaller but very significant wins in Georgia and Florida and, of all places, Mississippi. The winds of change are picking up speed. We will see change in our lifetime. It’s a pretty big fucking deal and we should truly rejoice in this outcome and what it means.
This is our nation waking up, finally, to its true power: the power of the people.
And then there’s New York City. Not State. City. The Big Apple is its own universe; a cosmopolitan microcosm that embodies the Spirit of America. The place of all places made by immigrants and their bright minds who became the gatekeepers of the “land of the free”, the gate through which the huddled masses came into this country, yearning to breathe freedom. The cosmopolitan NYC we all feel connected to by virtue of this reality. Through its glories and shortcomings it became a symbol.
A symbol of hope; a symbol of the undying resolve to progressive values, to mind blowing innovation, through a mix of creative thinking in engineering, in artistic expression, in social processes, in scientific achievement. Behind every aspect of this symbolism, the ingenuity of the human mind and the resilience of the human spirit, stood the immigrant, yearning to breathe free.
After World War Two was over (not just then but especially since then) it’s undeniable that the Jewish immigrants came to personify this spirit in a particular manner: NYC became their home away from home and they love it fiercely for it. A place, like Israel, where they could breathe free, safe from the horrors they experienced in Europe. In the place where most Jews live together outside Israel, they became the thread that stitched the city’s fabric together in ways great and small.
The Jewish immigrants did not weave this fabric on their own, did not throw it over anything that was there before, did not try to make NYC a Jewish city. They did it by coming together with those who came before them, not replacing the fabric but becoming a unifying thread of it, improving it, strengthening it. Knowing only too well what it is to be persecuted, they stood with the Muslim community after 9/11. To them, “we are all New Yorkers” weren’t just words.
Human beings of all faiths perished in the Twin Towers, Muslims and Jews alike. They were all New Yorkers. In that fateful moment the city became the center of the world and its cosmopolitan roots emerged to save it and rebuild it. If there ever was a time when the mayor of New York could have made the jump from Broadway to the National Stage that was 9/11. It didn’t happen. The Mayor of NYC rules over its own micro universe and thrives or fails according to its rules.
The NYC Mayor’s thread is supposed to strengthen the city’s fabric, to become a part of it. Can Zohran Mamdani achieve this?
Considering the unequivocal presence of a strong Jewish thread in the fabric of New York the answer is no. Mamdani’s words may seem to address it. In his first speech as Mayor elect he did mention fighting antisemitism. En passant. It didn’t sound like it was heartfelt. I don’t think it is.
Those excited by Zohran Mamdani’s youth and ideas, by his extraordinary rise from nobody to Mayor of NYC, are as foolish to see it as the future of the Democratic Party as the Republicans who are now working overtime to make him the leader of the Democratic Party. They are both wrong and it won’t stick. And it is not just the unique character of the City or the fact that a Mayor is the ultimate city dweller, focused on local affairs. It’s the fact that Zohran Mamdani is not a Democrat.
Can you imagine an elected Republican telling those who elected him thank you but I want you to know I am a Democrat? That is what Mamdani did, yesterday. He admitted to all who could hear him that he used the Democratic ticket to be elected but he is really not a Democrat. But thank you, anyway. I have said before that Democrats reluctance to embrace social democracy would pave the way for third party candidates to lay their eggs in their nest. Zohran is the ultimate cuckoo chick.
But it’s not his socialist agenda that bothers me. A socialist party should be welcomed in a democracy. It has its place. It bugs me that they choose to place their eggs in the Democratic Party’s nest due to the party’s own failure to make the distinction between social democracy and democratic socialism, but that dog will never hunt and the impact of it will haunt us still but what worries me, as it worries the Jewish community in NYC, is what’s behind his brand of “socialism”.
Zohran Mamdani did not run on his antisemitic beliefs and yet everything about him leads to them as the core of his political agenda. He is a privileged child, a bourgeois chique revolutionary, a populist with a silver spoon in his mouth. One needs to look no further than his campaign finances to realize the interests behind him. Those interests will demand a return on investment. There are no PAC contributions free from that kind of return.
I am not worried about what Mamdani’s victory means for the future of the Democratic Party nationally. I am worried about NYC. I am worried about it electing someone whose main objective, concealed under social justice goals, is not to strengthen the city’s fabric but to engage in dismantling it by cutting one of its most important threads out. The saddest part of it all is someone like Zohran Mamdani would be the perfect person to fight antisemitism and expose anti-Zionism.
But his heart would need to be in the right place in order to do that. It is not. Yes, I like many of “his ideas”; ideals that should be espoused by Democrats, still too afraid of social democracy to reject the democratic socialist eggs in their nest. It’s just that those ideas were used to lure the masses to his side and are but stepping stones to allow the interests who bankrolled him the return on their investment.
New York is not a Jewish city, but it can’t be the New York we came to love without the Jewish community. This isn’t about taxing the rich, making life affordable and living dignified. All these things are needed and must happen. This is about not understanding the way NYC’s heart beats and trying to transplant another heart into its body. It’s a doomed surgical procedure. The delusional may rejoice at the idea of it, but the body will reject it. I hope New York will keep its heart. Time will tell.