The Blogs: Dear Zohran: One Year Later, More Advice

Dear Mr. Mayor,

Last time I wrote, you’d just won the primary. I wasn’t surprised then, and I’m not surprised now that “Mayor” is where we landed. Six months in, and already the most talked-about politician in the country. Credit where it’s due: you’ve kept more campaign promises than any politician in my lifetime. Expanded childcare, the state’s first pied-à-terre tax (overdue doesn’t begin to cover it), a city-run grocery pilot in East Harlem, and a real crackdown on the landlords who’ve been getting away with negligent tactics for profit. You’ve made real change feel possible and efficient. And that Knicks speech, eight minutes that did more for civic morale than most politicians manage in a full term. Authenticity is rare in politics. You’ve got it, and it shows.

You’ve also made “everywhere, all the time” look like an actual governing strategy, which is more than I can say for most of your colleagues on either side of the aisle. Older politicians, take notes.

You already know all this, the polls say so, and apparently so does the president, who by all accounts can be seen smiling next to you these days. I’m writing again because I want to give you something the polling doesn’t capture: what six months of Mayor Mamdani looks like from inside my extended community, the Jewish, and the quietly self-conscious, moderate, self-identifying fiscally conservative class of this city.

I can’t get through a social media scroll or a dinner without your name coming up. This week’s video, doubling down on your wish to arrest Netanyahu and calling on the federal government to finish the job, isn’t helping. Sometimes it’s praise. Sometimes it’s something closer to dread, not about any specific policy, but about what you might represent: the opening act of the thing Jews and conservative voters have spent generations bracing for. Let me try and explain how I now realize how both these groups share a similar anxiety around you that I am now fully starting to grasp.

On the term socialism

I hear “card-carrying communist” more than I’d like, as if given the chance, you’d tear down capitalism and hand us all the same size apartment. I sit with that accusation with a mix of amusement and a nagging discomfort, because I understand exactly where the discomfort comes from: the instinct to always keep a bag half-packed, just in case. That’s not really commentary on your tax policy. That’s inherited Jewish and political vigilance talking.

I don’t think the “reeducation” camps are coming in the slightest. But the anxiety underneath it isn’t irrational, even when it overshoots, on the right, and among plenty of moderates too.

“Socialism” has become the word people reach for whenever a program asks them to subsidize someone they’ve already decided doesn’t deserve it. Paul Krugman made a useful point recently: almost nobody in American politics, including the people who call themselves democratic socialists, is a socialist in any textbook sense. Most are asking for what Europe calls social democracy, capitalism with the sharp edges filed off. That tracks with what I’ve always understood your coalition to want. We already run a mild version of “socialism” here: public schools, public roads, a police force, Medicare. We’re just trying to catch up to the rest of the developed world on healthcare, energy and climate change, which for the richest country on earth is not exactly a flex, especially when just measuring GDP misses the mark on quality of life.

Here’s the gap: nobody’s said the “capitalist” half of that sentence out loud, often enough, in plain English. Capitalism is as American as it gets; socialism still carries the smell of the Cold War for people whose grandparents fought it, on both sides of the ocean. This is the anxiety our conservative peers feel. If the plan really is “I’m a capitalist who wants a floor under people, not a ceiling over them on success and profit,” say that sentence. Often. Loudly.

On the other fear

Which brings me to what I hear more, underneath the socialism talk: a fear that isn’t about your tax policy at all. Jews carry an inherited weight. I have extended family who survived pogroms and the Holocaust, parents who grew up only seven years removed from it. The lesson passed down is that comfort here is conditional, revocable, historically temporary. We had slices of good in 1900s Germany too. That fear isn’t unique to us or any ethnic group. I’ll admit I’ve never fully sat with what it’s like to carry the equivalent version of it as a Muslim in this country, and specifically as a Muslim kid coming of age here right after 9/11, a version of this I have been slow to reckon with and not emphasized with enough by my people and other groups.

In my first letter to you, I asked for nuance on Israel, while asking Jews to stay engaged, not retreat, even where we disagree with you. I’ll add the thing never said out loud: this country has been remarkably good for Jews. We’ve built outsized success here in ways nobody can fully explain. I raise it because the flip side is a pattern your community understands as well as mine: visible success tends to make a group the first place people look when something goes wrong, and for Jews that pattern has ended in violence often enough that we’ve built an internal alarm for it. Any mention of Israel, any assignment of blame, and the alarm goes off, fair or not. I don’t need to bring up Jewish space lasers or anything Candace Owens or Hassan Piker are saying these days. Scapegoating is par. Credit where it’s due again: you’ve been responsive on antisemitic incidents, and you worked with the Council on protest buffers around both synagogues and mosques. That’s the right instinct.

You know a version of that same instinct, from a different angle. I wish my own community said more often that being Muslim in this country, this century, has also been extremely hard and that we still have real work to do taking the Palestinian cause as seriously as it deserves. I believe your goal is to give a marginalized group like the Palestinians, who are a part of your direct Muslim community, the attention their cause deserves when it comes to mistreatment in certain areas of the West Bank. I even heard Rahm Emanuel, of all people, make that point this month at Tel Aviv University, telling Israelis that unconditional support has costs and Palestinian self-determination isn’t optional.

What I’d change

None of this should stop you from talking about Israel. But wording is doing real damage here. It’s why the anti-socialism crowd hears “coming for your paycheck,” and why Jews hear “coming for us, eventually, quietly, again,” and feel a similar anxiety.

Say the quiet part: you’re a capitalist. Say you believe in the entrepreneurial engine of this country and just want a floor under it, not a ceiling on it, so nobody goes bankrupt over a fatal event or sleeps on a subway platform. That’s maintenance, not confiscation. Say it plainly, and say it often.

Be a Zionist ally without being a Palestinian enemy. You can support Jews who want a homeland where they’re safe without treating “Zionist” like a slur while supporting Palestinian dignity and right to their own state. I know you recently clarified that you don’t want any land that prioritizes one ethnic group, whether it’s Israel or Saudi Arabia. But do as I pleaded before, sit in the nuance of this reality that what makes America unique doesn’t seamlessly fit everywhere. Put one step at a time peace before utopia. We can talk history of the Balfour Declaration and the Nakba and acknowledge the injustices there forever, but we must also admit the reality of moving forward and why we are here. Understand why some groups would want this and celebrate Israel’s championing of democracy while saying others are behind in many ways.

Drop the arrest theater. This week’s video is the clearest example of exactly this problem. You spent two minutes calling Netanyahu a war criminal and saying he’s not welcome in the city, then admitted in the same breath that your own legal team confirmed you never actually had the authority to arrest him in the first place, something your law department could have told you a year ago. That’s the worst version of both worlds: aggressive enough to confirm every fear my community has about where this is headed, hollow enough that even sympathetic viewers are calling it a walk-back dressed up as a stand. This selective use of one issue for political benefit is exactly what gives the Jewish community fair pause.

There’s a harder question underneath it too. No ICC warrant exists for Xi Jinping, so the legal comparison isn’t clean, but our own State Department has called what’s happening to the Uyghurs a genocide, and I’ve never heard you call Xi a war criminal or say he’s not welcome here, despite Chinese officials passing through New York for UN business constantly. I don’t think that’s cynicism, your convictions on Israel clearly run deep. But the selectiveness is exactly what keeps my community nervous, even when you’re right about the facts.

Don’t let AIPAC be the only face of money in politics. When you talk about getting big money out of politics, and you should, don’t let AIPAC become the poster child while defense contractors, real estate, pharma, and a dozen other lobbies write far bigger checks with far less scrutiny. I don’t love blind, uncritical support for any government, Israel included. But AIPAC exists because of something real: Jews organizing a political voice to protect themselves after watching, within living memory, exactly what happens without one. That’s not paranoia wearing a suit. It’s the same instinct behind why we will fight so hard to keep Israel standing at all, especially when almost every other people on earth already has a haven of its own, and we spent two thousand years without one.

Choose your allies as carefully as your words. You don’t need to agree with everything Darializa Avila Chevalier believes to share a stage with her, but there’s a real difference between wanting a fairer capitalism and refusing to say a murderer belongs in prison or standing near people who cheered October 7th before the bodies were even counted. Put daylight between you and that, loudly, the same way you’d want daylight between yourself and anyone smearing your own community. This should be a red line.

Do this, and I think you may pick up a lot of the people who are still bracing for the worst, because the worst has, historically, happened, recently enough that “recently” isn’t ancient history, especially in our communities and family. If you don’t, I don’t have the evidence to talk the doubters down, and the people who think you’d nationalize the deli on the corner and dismantle Israel in the same afternoon get to keep believing it, because I won’t be able to prove them wrong.

With respect, even more hope, and another year of watching closely.

References:

Mayor Mamdani, Governor Hochul announce the state’s first pied-à-terre tax (nyc.gov)
Mayor Mamdani announces La Marqueta as first city-run grocery store site (nyc.gov)
Mamdani’s Knicks championship City Hall remarks (nyc.gov, June 2026)
Paul Krugman, “There Are Very Few Socialists in America” (paulkrugman.substack.com, July 2, 2026)
Rahm Emanuel’s Tel Aviv University address (AP / JTA / Times of Israel, July 8, 2026)
Reporting on Darializa Avila Chevalier’s public statements and deleted posts (CNN, Reason, Fox News, June to July 2026)
Mamdani video calling on federal government to arrest Netanyahu (AP, CNN, JTA, July 21-22, 2026)
US State Department genocide determination on China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang (2021, reaffirmed by subsequent administration)
Reporting on Hasan Piker’s antisemitism accusations and House resolution condemning him (JTA, ADL statements, Snopes, Fox News, April-May 2026)
Reporting on Candace Owens’ antisemitic conspiracy theories cited in the same congressional resolution (Snopes, April-May 2026)