Losing Honestly

What Mamdani’s Victory Reveals About Us

Like many, I’m dismayed and angry that Zohran Mamdani has become mayor of New York. It feels not only like a political defeat but also a personal failure, as I was deeply involved (in my private capacity) in the campaign against him.

I’ve written several times about why I think Mamdani is dangerous, so I won’t repeat myself here. This is a piece written for those who, like me, agree that Mamdani represents a serious threat to Jews, and in general to moderate, facts-based politics.

Yes, Mamdani’s victory is highly circumstantial. Andrew Cuomo was a deeply flawed candidate who ran a pathetic campaign, and the divided field failed to coalesce. Had the situation been different on any of these factors, we’d be singing a very different tune today. It’s also true that Mamdani underperformed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris by at least 20 percentage points. In a city that is 75% Democrat, eking out a narrow victory is not a triumph but a warning.

And yet, the lessons of this election are still valid because, as history teaches, what was hitherto unthinkable becomes the new baseline.

I’m moved to write this because, to my dismay, I have now added a new concern: we aren’t learning from our failure. The many conversations I participate in end in the comfort of the known. They suggest “more of the same” and doubling down on the same strategies that led to defeat. People seem to think that if we would have won had we only said one more time that Mamdani is an antisemitic jihadi. If we had exposed more aggressively his ties to extremists, he would have been crushed. If we had called him a Marxist more forcefully, voters would have rejected him. Sadly, none of that is true.

The painful truth: Zohran Mamdani did not win simply because Cuomo was weak or because the field was divided. He won because a coalition formed around him—and because much of the Jewish community found itself unable to prevent, shape, or even meaningfully enter that coalition. That failure was not tactical alone. It was structural, political, and moral.

One of the Jewish values I cherish the most is self-criticism – and I see very little of that in the wake of this election. So, for once, I want to challenge myself and our community to think differently, not with rightful indignation but with an eye to what works and what doesn’t. As the Hebrew saying goes, this is not about being right, but about being smart.

In that spirit, let’s be honest and open-minded. Here are five key mistakes we made (and when I say ‘we’, I’m including myself in the collective).

1. We diluted the charge of antisemitism—and avoided the harder argument.

For years, the Jewish community has relied heavily on the language of antisemitism as its primary political defense. Sometimes rightly. Sometimes necessarily. But too often, too clumsily and indiscriminately.

Words, like currencies, lose value when overissued.

In Mamdani’s case, labeling him an antisemite failed to persuade. Not because he isn’t one, but because the accusation came untethered from a clear, compelling argument. We asserted where we needed to explain. We denounced where we needed to teach.

Most troublingly, we failed to persuade not only non-Jews, but Jews. A claim that cannot be explained within one’s own community will not carry weight beyond it.

Probably rightfully, we claimed that in the context of an existential war, Jewish criticism of Israel was unpatriotic and suspect. But the result of that was that many Jews couldn’t tell the difference between criticism of policies and anti-Zionism and thus fell prey to the antisemitic propaganda. Wouldn’t a better strategy be to highlight Zionist/patriotic voices that reject Israel’s government but fight for the country’s right to exist?

For both Jews and non-Jews, instead of patiently articulating how the denial of Jewish collective self-determination, uniquely among peoples, reproduces older antisemitic patterns, we defaulted to moral shorthand. The result was predictable: the label failed to stick, and Mamdani was able to position himself as principled, progressive, and unfairly maligned.

Even more concerning, the overuse of the “antisemite” label is being felt on both the left and the right. In a recent Substack post, Conservative thinker Rob Deher described the same dynamic among MAGA zoomers, “Jewish organizations have policed speech critical of Israel, and of anything to do with Jews, so heavily over the decades that they have caused intense resentment among the Gentile Zoomercons. One man told me that for as long as he has been in politics, any criticism of Israel got you tagged as an anti-Semite, and that was a potential career-killer. So, his generation has come to hate that, and to cease caring about the opinions of Jews.”

The question is not whether the critics are right. I think they aren’t, but that’s irrelevant. In politics, perception is reality.

So the question for us is: how do we make our case intelligently, without devaluing it and without alienating our potential interlocutors?

2. We dismissed the damage that “Jewish fig leaves” can do.

Related to our inability to present Mamdani as the antisemite he is was the existence of Jewish individuals, groups, or organizations that were instrumentalized by his campaign. Marginal voices succeeded in presenting themselves as mainstream and representative, thereby blunting the impact of our denunciations.

Here, too, we can choose righteous indignation or self-criticism. The natural reaction could be to say that we haven’t attacked those groups nearly enough. Maybe that’s true, but I doubt it. I, like many others, spent months denouncing any of Mamdani’s Jewish allies, from Brad Lander to Jewish Voices for Peace, to NYJA. It didn’t make a dent, and I doubt more of the same will.

Why? Because like with antisemitism, we have overused terms like “treason,” “self-hating Jews,” and even “kapo.” On social media and WhatsApp groups, those epithets are now commonplace and applied to mainstream Jewish organizations like UJA and ADL.

The new popular literary genre of “attacking legacy Jewish organizations,” so common on the Jewish Right, had the effect of devaluing the valid arguments that are leveled against genuinely self-hating or even treasonous groups.

When I attack JVP, I sometimes get this response: “You people also call the ADL self-hating progressives, so I can’t take you seriously.”

This is not to say that critiquing legacy organizations is not valid or necessary, and this is certainly not a defense of them, but the lack of nuance and the vitriol we sometimes use make it extremely hard to make the same arguments against truly noxious entities or individuals.

When everybody is an antisemite, nobody is. When everybody is a self-hating Jew, nobody is.

3. We spoke about our fears while ignoring voters’ lives.

We failed to see that politics, especially urban politics, is not primarily a referendum on moral warnings. It is a negotiation over lived realities.

Mamdani understood this. His campaign spoke, relentlessly and concretely, about affordability: rent, transportation, childcare, debt, the cost of remaining in the city at all. These were not abstractions; they were the daily anxieties of voters trying to survive New York.

Our response was to warn.

We warned about antisemitism. We warned about extremism. We warned about danger. I personally warned about populism. All of this matters, but warnings, unaccompanied by engagement with voters’ material concerns, sound to many like a demand for special consideration.

This is not how coalitions are built.

A community that wishes to be heard must demonstrate that it is listening. We asked voters to prioritize our fears while offering little evidence that we were invested in their struggles. That asymmetry, whether justified or not, was politically fatal.

Antisemitism is not a parochial issue. But it cannot be advanced as if it were detached from the broader civic project of making a city livable.

4. We lack serious infrastructure for local politics.

Another uncomfortable truth: the Jewish community is poorly equipped for local, urban political engagement.

We are strong at national advocacy. Strong at philanthropy. Strong at crisis mobilization. But city politics, the slow, unglamorous work of housing policy, transit, zoning, school boards, tenant law, coalition maintenance, has become a blind spot.

That space is underfunded, understaffed, and underprioritized. Some organizations, like NYSN, fight a heroic fight, but they are still the “poor cousin” of Jewish advocacy.

As a result, when a candidate like Mamdani emerges—one fluent in city governance, movement politics, and legislative mechanics—we find ourselves reactive. We issue statements. We mobilize donors late. We hope that media attention will compensate for the absence of a durable political presence.

It does not.

Local politics rewards those who show up consistently, not those who arrive when alarms are already sounding.

5. We withdrew from urban coalitions—and were replaced.

Perhaps the most consequential failure is this: Mamdani was able to assemble a winning coalition that largely excluded the Jewish community because, in many urban spaces, we had already exited.

Tenants’ rights organizations. Housing advocacy groups. Labor-adjacent movements. Transit and affordability campaigns. These were once arenas where Jewish institutions played visible, constructive roles. Over time, many stepped back—sometimes because of socio-demographic changes, sometimes because of ideological discomfort, sometimes because of donor pressure, sometimes because Israeli politics made participation complicated. All this is understandable, and to be fair, in many cases, we didn’t withdraw but were pushed out.

But whatever the reason, the vacuum did not remain empty. Others filled it. Relationships were built. Trust accumulated. A common language developed. When the election arrived, those networks mobilized—without us. We were surprised and flatfooted.

Coalitions are not assembled in the final weeks of a campaign. They are the product of years of shared work on issues that matter to people’s lives. One cannot withdraw from that work and expect inclusion when political stakes rise.

Choosing humility over consolation

There is a temptation, after a loss like this, to retreat into moral certainty: to say that voters were misled, that antisemitism has become normalized, that nothing could have been done.

That temptation must be resisted, even if those propositions ring true.

Yes, antisemitism is real. Yes, Mamdani, despite his protestations, is a clear danger to Jews. Yes, the opposing campaign was weak and fragmented.

All of this can be true—and still be beside the point.

The more important question is whether we are prepared to rebuild the institutional, political, and moral capacities required to be effective participants in the cities we inhabit. That means persuasion over denunciation, presence over protest, coalition over isolation.

Defeat can be clarifying…if we allow it to be.

We did not lose because we were ignored. We lost because we failed to make ourselves indispensable to the civic life around us.

That is a harder lesson. But a productive one, if we choose to act on it.

A Hassidic story tells it wonderfully: A man gets lost in the forest. He wandered for days, tried different paths, but couldn’t find the way out. When he thought all was lost, he met the great Hassidic Master, the Baal Shem Tov. He could not believe his luck. “Master,” he said, tearfully, “I’m so grateful. I’ve been lost for days. Thank God I ran into you!” The Baal Shem said, “Well, my friend, I’m lost too.” The man’s face fell, “But fear not,” continued the Baal Shem, “we now know something very valuable – we know that the path you took is not the right one, and I know that the path I took is not the right one. Now we can look together for a new path.”