My Two Cents on the New York City Mayoral Race

This whole episode is a perfect case study in how Israeli media has abdicated its most basic responsibility: mediating reality for the public. Instead, every global event becomes a prop in a national psychodrama — a chance for moral grandstanding rather than analysis. To see this clearly, we don’t even need to talk about Zohran Mamdani, the breakout star of the race. Let’s talk about his opponent — Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo served as governor of New York from 2011 to 2021. He’s also the son of Mario Cuomo, who held the same office from 1983 to 1995, and before that served as lieutenant governor. The elder Cuomo groomed his son’s political rise, and together the Cuomos became something like New York’s political royalty — deeply embedded in the Democratic Party machine, intertwined with the press (Andrew’s brother was a primetime CNN anchor), and intimately connected to big money.

During his decade in office, Andrew Cuomo’s name was rarely far from scandal. Development projects he championed upstate were riddled with corruption, ending in indictments for his allies. A special anti-corruption task force he established was quietly disbanded after he repeatedly interfered in its work. He weaponized his office to intimidate critics, used government staff and resources to write a self-congratulatory COVID memoir for personal profit, and covered up the true death toll in nursing homes after a disastrous directive sent infected seniors back too soon. Since 2020, more than a dozen women have accused him of sexual harassment. By 2021, facing impeachment, he resigned in disgrace.

Enter Zohran Mamdani — young, charismatic, and unentangled with the Democratic establishment that has grown bloated and irrelevant in the Trump era. He ran on an unapologetically progressive platform: massive investment in public transit, steep taxes on billionaires, deregulating the food market to lower prices, and strict rent controls in a city where the median rent now hovers around 10,000 shekels ($2,600) a month and has soared roughly 18% annually since COVID (60% in Manhattan, 40% in the Bronx).

Mamdani swept the Democratic primaries — the real election in New York — leaving Cuomo humiliated. But Cuomo refused to bow out, running as an independent. The problem for him is simple: he has no cards left to play. New Yorkers already know him too well. They know he’s tied to donors and lobbyists, that under his watch public services deteriorated, the cost of living exploded, and crime rose. So his campaign has focused on one thing only: Mamdani’s Muslim identity. Recently, he even secured an endorsement from Donald Trump, a man loathed by New York’s electorate.

And here’s where history rhymes. Let’s go back to Mario Cuomo. In 1977, he ran for mayor against Ed Koch. The Cuomo campaign circulated rumors that Koch was gay, plastering the city with the slogan: “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.” Koch went on to win, later saying that if he truly were gay, he’d have hoped for the courage to say so, and that Cuomo’s smear was shameful because it treated homosexuality as something disgraceful. Koch would serve as mayor until 1989, remembered as one of the city’s most iconic leaders, second perhaps only to Fiorello LaGuardia.

Fast forward to today. Imagine you live in New York. You’re not Israeli, not even Jewish. You’re choosing between two candidates. One you already know: entitled, corrupt, serially accused, a creature of the old political machine that failed you. The other — young, idealistic, not yet compromised, talking about things that actually affect your life: rent, safety, transport, dignity. He’s Muslim. But in your building live people from seventeen countries and five religions.

So be honest — who gets your vote? Exactly.

So let’s be clear: this isn’t about the “Islamization” of New York or some imported intifada. It’s a simple, familiar choice — between the bloated and the hungry, the corrupt and the clean.

Now, a word about Mamdani, or rather, about us. Yes, Mamdani isn’t a Zionist. Would I prefer that he were? Sure. Does it matter for his role as New York’s mayor? Not really. What does matter is what his election says about the evolving relationship between Israeli and American Jewry.

If his tenure strengthens the sense of safety and belonging among New York’s Jews, the distance between them and Israel will deepen. If it leads to insecurity, it might draw them closer. We’ve reached a tragic point where for Diaspora Jews to feel affinity with Israel, things have to go badly for them. That’s the real crisis – not Zohran Mamdani. And that crisis was born of our leadership, not theirs.

The obsession with what a New York mayor thinks of Israel is just another symptom of our own pathology – the fixation on image over substance. It’s the logical endpoint of Netanyahu’s doctrine of hasbara: that Israel has no real problems, only PR ones. It’s a lie – a lie that has imploded. And picking up the pieces, rebuilding something honest and humane, isn’t New York’s responsibility.

It’s ours.