Last Friday, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, a leading Reform rabbi in New York City, slammed the idea of Mamdani being the next mayor of New York.
By Rachel Avraham
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan delivered a searing rebuke of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in a Friday night sermon, but stopped short of endorsing his rival, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, Haaretz reported.
“Some fear that in the most Jewish city in the world, we are becoming strangers once again. I share many of those fears,” Buchdahl told her congregation, the Reform Central Synagogue in Manhattan, the Times of Israel reported.
According to the report, she expressed fears about the normalization of anti-Zionism, the demonization of Israel, of children feeling ashamed to identify as Zionist or wear Jewish symbols, and how anti-Zionist rhetoric and antisemitism have caused deadly anti-Jewish violence.
“Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism,” Buchdahl said, pointing to Mamdani’s 2023 accusation that Israel was responsible for police violence in New York, the Times of Israel added. It should be emphasized that a common accusation among antisemites is that Jews are responsible for all of the world’s problems, from the COVID pandemic to the Vietnam War to African slavery to the September 11 terror attacks.
“This crosses the line clearly into antisemitism — not only demonizing Israelis but echoing the age-old antisemitic trope that Jews across the world are the root cause of our problems here,” she said, also denouncing Mamdani’s “false claims of genocide” in Gaza, his unwillingness to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” and his opposition to Israel as a Jewish state, the Times of Israel reported. “It is hard not to fear that the environment we witnessed for our Jewish children on Columbia’s campus after October 7 [2023] could be a preview of the way that New York City could start feeling for all Jews,” she said.
Rabbi Buchdahl is not alone in her fears about Mamdani. A group calling themselves the Jewish Majority recently wrote a letter that obtained over 1,100 signatures from rabbis and cantors across America condemned Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, as well as the broader “political normalization” of anti-Zionist politics in American life. The letter, entitled “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” argued that when figures like Mamdani “refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide,” they “delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews.” It also argued that “Zionism, Israel, [and] Jewish self-determination” are inseparable parts of Jewish identity.
With days to election day, Mamdani leads Cuomo by 16 points overall, according to a Marist University poll released last week, Haaretz reported. But among Jewish voters, the race looks dramatically different. Both Marist and Fox News polls show Cuomo winning 55 percent of Jewish voters compared to 32 percent for Mamdani, Haaretz noted. According to the report, a Quinnipiac poll showed an even wider gap, with Cuomo at 60 percent and Mamdani at just 16 percent among Jewish voters.
Photo from Dmitryshein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohran_Mamdani#/media/File:Zohran_Mamdani_05.25.25_(b)_(cropped).jpg
