Still an Activist, Not Yet New York’s Mayor

There are official acts that reveal more about what their author thinks an office is for than any speech could. The video released by the mayor of New York City on Friday evening, in the hour before Jewish New Yorkers lit their Shabbat candles, is such an act. It did not commemorate a historical event. It declared a catastrophe ongoing. It named the founding of Israel a continuing wrong, and it did so through the official account of City Hall, the seal of the office, the resources of the city.

The familiar complaint is that the mayor has mixed his personal convictions with his office. This misnames the failure. No one governs from a mind emptied of conviction. A mayor is permitted, even expected, to bring convictions to the office. He may be an activist on the questions the office was given to him to address. If he believes the city should be greener, he may campaign for it, marshal the budget toward it, use the seal and the bully pulpit to advance it. If he believes housing should be more affordable, or policing reformed, or schools rebuilt, he may pursue these as causes, not merely as files. New Yorkers elected him precisely because he held positions on such questions. The instruments of the office are designed to be used by someone who holds them.

But the instruments were given to him for the city. They were given to him to decide questions that fall within the city’s authority and within his accountability to its residents. The founding of Israel is not such a question. Neither are international questions over which the office holds neither jurisdiction nor meaningful accountability, whether the war in Gaza, the government of China, or the policies of sovereign states beyond the five boroughs. On these, the mayor of New York holds no portfolio. He was not elected to render verdicts on them. The seal of City Hall carries no weight in them.

When he uses the office to pronounce on them anyway, something specific happens. His view of Israel is one view among millions, distinguished from the rest by nothing in particular. But when it is broadcast through the official account of City Hall, attached to the seal, addressed in the voice of the mayor of New York, it acquires a reach it has not earned. It is no truer for being so transmitted. It is only louder. The mayoralty of New York is one of the most powerful platforms in the country precisely because of the office’s significance to the city and to the nation. To use that platform to broadcast a private opinion on a question outside the office’s authority is to convert public significance into private volume.

This is the distinction between an activist who is also a mayor and an activist who happens to hold the office of mayor. The first directs his activism through the office to the questions the office was built to answer. The second directs the office to the questions his activism has already decided. The first is doing the work of governing. The second is using the chair of governing to do other work.

A mayor of New York who held the convictions Mamdani holds had options that fell within the proper shape of the office. He could speak as a private citizen and label himself as one. He could acknowledge the depth of disagreement among his own constituents, including Jews who oppose Israeli policies and Jews who support them, Palestinians of varied views, immigrants from across the Arab world with their own histories. He could use the office, if he used it at all on this question, to hold the disagreement of his city openly rather than to declare it resolved on the city’s behalf.

He does none of these things, and the reason matters. Plainly, these are not, for him, questions the city should be allowed to keep open. They are questions he has come to office to close.

Five months of evidence suggest this is where the mayor stands. On his first day, he revoked the executive order adopting a definition of antisemitism, the order restricting municipal participation in boycotts of Israel, and the order protecting houses of worship from protest harassment. The Office to Combat Antisemitism, kept in name, has no director, no public presence, no operational reality. Bills passed by the Council to restore the protections he revoked were met with vetoes or refusals to sign.

When protesters returned this month to the same synagogue that prompted the original protections, chanting “Death to the IDF” and flying a Hezbollah flag, his administration’s first public response was to criticize the event being held inside the building. Once again.

The pattern across these acts matters. They are not pronouncements about Israel. They are acts of municipal governance, executive orders, vetoes, the structure of a city office, the protection of houses of worship, bent away from the work they were designed to do and toward a position on a question outside the city’s authority and unresolved within it. The activism on Gaza is not happening alongside the governance of the city. It is being conducted through the governance of the city.

The video on Friday was this in its purest form. It was not a mayor speaking on a matter within his portfolio. It was an activist using the apparatus of a portfolio he holds for other reasons, to advance a cause his office was not given to him to advance. A mayor who cannot tell the difference between the questions his office is for and the questions his convictions reach is not, in the full sense of the word, doing the work of a mayor. Five months in, this remains the central fact about how New York is being governed.